


Mojo Pin

by thestargirl



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Angst, Drug Abuse, M/M, So much angst, and it allows me to write Tenderness and Yearning and Gay, and project all of my problems into Curt and Brian as normal, but mainly this is angst, codependent relationships, mentions of addiction and overdose, mentions of sexual abuse, suicidal tendencies/behavior, this probably WONT get smutty unless I really feel like it'll serve my jumbled up plot, which i KNOW is upsetting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2020-07-29 01:27:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20073853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestargirl/pseuds/thestargirl
Summary: "If only you'd come back to me,If you laid at my side,Wouldn't need no mojo pin,To keep me satisfied."Curt Wild's life is a fragmented mess, and is best told in pieces. Set mainly in and around Berlin.





	1. I'm Lying In Bed, The Blanket Is Warm

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Most of this is written, but I was so excited to put a fic up I figured I'd put up the first chapter so I could focus on writing, editing, and working with the final chapters without having a rushed feeling. Most likely the second chapter will be up by tomorrow, as it finishes this scene out, and then there will be a bit of a lull as I line everything else up. Thanks!

The light behind Jack’s head has given him a rosy halo, and turned his soft, moody eyes to bruised sockets.  
“Curt, he’s alive.”  
Curt’s so high he can barely sit up. Everything is hazy, even as Jack turns on the overhead, illuminating the glittering sea of dried blood and broken glass, the holes kicked in the hotel walls, the cliché that is the demolished television lying by the bedside.  
“He’s been lying to us,”  
Jack’s long white fingers are clenched tight together, the only visible sign of his suppressed rage,  
“He’s not really dead.”  
Curt starts to breathe out, and then finds that it goes on forever.  
“What?”  
“He’s not dead. It was a stunt- He faked it, for the publicity.”  
He mulls over the phrase as though it were a fat gumball, rolling it around, letting it rest in the pocket of each cheek- ‘It was a stunt. It was a stunt.’  
He glances back up at Jack: Lily white, deathly still, and a dull sense of terror overtakes him as he realizes he hasn’t succeeded: Despite the smack, the nightmares have come anyway, only they are not what he expected. Slow, eerie, like weeds rippling at the bottom of a pond- He’d been hiding from the violence of it. The picture. The pictures on the TV- Hiding from the blood, hiding from the soft figure of Brian that was no doubt curled up in his head, scrabbling and bleeding like a dying rodent, just waiting for him to nod off so he could come looking for him. Maybe he’s dead now, and this is Heaven, and if he stands up and follows the combination of ripples and soft hand cream scent that is Jack Brian will be there. Maybe he’ll be small and blonde again, just outside, sitting and waiting. He wants to crawl forward and find him, sniff him out like a dog, wrap up in him like a sheet, but it’s a lie and he will wake up and what he knows will be true again.  
“Don’t tell that to me.” He says, slowly.  
“Curt, listen to me,” Jack falls to his knees, right down into the glass,  
“Don’t touch me. Do not.”  
“You’re not dreaming, dear. You’re not. Look at me- He’s alright. He’s alright.”  
“Jack, please stop. Stop it.”  
He vomits, nothing but bile, and still that doesn’t stop the electric eel movement inside his chest, the heavy nightmare fear he feels towards Jack, or whatever he is,  
“Curt, sweetheart-“  
“Stop it, I don’t want to hear it, stop it-“

The door opens with a squeal, and bright, cold water hits Curt’s face, stinging his eyes like bleach.  
He writhes and sputters, shaking his head, kicking out and accidentally glancing his foot off Jack’s shoulder.  
“Hey! Don’t touch him, asshole.”  
“Malcolm, please. This is supposed to be a business engagement.”  
“He’s really fucked up. I told you, you should’ve waited.”  
Jack sighs, as though Curt were a baby unable to understand social graces,  
“I hated to keep it from him, I thought it would help. I’m so, so sorry about this.”  
“It’s okay. I deal with this shit all the time.”  
Malcolm narrows his eyes, which are clear and unmoved,  
“Put him in the bath, maybe. You gotta calm him down.”  
“Okay, that might be a good idea.”  
Curt’s eyes dart to him, wondering if he could make it to the street if he threw himself into it hard enough and just kept moving.  
Jack glances up at Malcolm with a gentle sway of his head,  
“I hope this isn’t too much of a bother.”  
“Oh, please, this is just Friday night for me,” He flashes Jack a wide, devilish smile,  
“Don’t think I’m about to wimp out on your show just ‘cause you employed a junkie- Hell, you’ve basically employed four more as of tonight.”  
“Sit here with him, won’t you?”  
“Sure.”  
Jack departs to the bathroom, and Malcolm sits down on a discarded bed pillow, blocking the door like a trickster gnome.  
Curt stares at him in silence. Though he’s been hanging around them more and more, much to Jack’s increasing enjoyment, he feels like he’s never gotten a very good look at him. Malcolm, without the whirling bravado he puts on in front of the band, seems small and underfed in his heavy black coat. Grit and sweat gleam on his pale skin, mixed with smudged and half-disintegrated layers of old makeup. It strikes Curt suddenly that beneath the coat he’s wearing one of Brian’s t-shirts- Totally defaced, with trails of Sharpied blood running from his parted lips, and black pitted eyes. Scrawled around the collar of the shirt is the phrase FADING FAST, done with precise red letters.  
Mal notices the horror on his face and crosses his arms.  
“Don’t freak, it's covered up."  
“Don’t bother, you sick fucking bitch.”  
He raises an eyebrow,  
“Sweetheart, you’re so whipped.”  
The door to the bathroom opens, and a tide of peach-scented steam rolls out.  
“Alright, Curt. Come here- We need to address some of those cuts.”  
Jack sways back into the room with an expression of concern usually reserved for only the most devoted of English nannies, and politely asks Malcolm to “Wait on the couch, if you’d be so kind.”  
Curt stands shakily and, clutching Jack’s arm, proceeds to spit at Malcolm and miss. He falls backward, laughing, splaying his arms wide so that the massacred Brian is hit with the full force of the overhead light. His bloody eyes follow him into the bathroom before he snaps the door closed, and turns his lacerated palms up to Jack's gentle fingers.  
Malcolm goes into the living room, and turns on the TV.


	2. This Body Will Never Be Safe From Harm

Jack closes Curt’s bedroom door without so much as a bump: He is curled up almost sweetly on the quilt, his hair fanning out around him in in wet, golden coils, his fist propped beneath his chin like a little boy dozing during a matinee. He resists, with some difficulty, the urge to place a kiss on his forehead. He settles instead for leaving a lingering touch as he tucks him in.

Jack's sleeves are damp to the elbow with bathwater, and now, after three days of tantrums and dealers and raging media nonsense, sick black shadows have appeared beneath his eyes.  
As he reenters the living room he turns to Malcolm, who's lounging comfortably on the sofa, boots kicked off.  
“I’m awfully sorry about that."  
"It's fine. May I smoke?”  
“Oh sure, why not.”  
He lights a cigarette and leans back, surveying the ceiling as Jack sits down.  
“You take very good care of him.”  
“Please, don’t mock me. Let us discuss the show.”  
“I’m not mocking you, I think it’s very kind.”  
“It’s very stupid of me to let him have his way so much: A true friend would have taken him to rehab, or maybe taken away his Polaroid collection.”  
“His what?” Malcolm’s eyes flicker open, instantly prepared to beg, his pout already in place should Jack try to refuse him.  
“He still has a few pictures of Brian-“  
“That’s hilarious-“  
“Not obscene ones,” Jack says dryly, “They’re actually rather sweet, and I’m not supposed to know about them. They were in the pockets of one of his jackets when Brian's company sent his things over- They’ve only made this whole thing worse."  
"D'you think Brian knows about them?"  
Jack frowns, and fixes his hair out of habit.  
"I'm certain."  
Malcolm exhales, smoke curling from the corners of his lips.  
“I'm sorry."  
“Don’t be, I should be sorry. I should’ve burned them- Everything, all of it, it needs to be burned. That’s how I came up with this fucking show in the first place. Light me one, won’t you?”  
Malcolm does as he’s told, and Jack accepts it, allowing himself a deep, grateful inhale.  
“I’m supposed to be quitting.”  
“After the official burial, you should quit for real.”  
Jack laughs, and turns an unconsciously sweet smile to him,  
“So you like the idea?”  
“I love it, truly, I do. But I think if you’re really going to do this, if you’re really going to kill it-“  
He clenches his fist, “You have to kill it right. You have to burn everything, as you said, so none of it can come back- All the corpses and all the leaves, all the roots and all the shoots, all of it. We can’t ever let it come back...It's almost vampiric, in that way.” Jack resists the urge to brush his hair from his forehead, but the way Malcolm’s mouth quirks, he might as well have done it. He taps the ash from his cigarette over the tray.  
“May I ask… If you hate it so much, why are you involved at all?”  
“I had nothing else to do. And I truly do respect what I thought the movement was about when I first heard of it, when I first heard of you, being not who you are, but whoever you want. Creating not yourself, but your fantasy- I’m doing that every day, all the time, but this-“  
He gestures to Curt’s door, to the decimated, tiny apartment, to Jack’s own weary, wan face,  
“This is just bloated. This is disgraceful."  
He plucks at his grimy, stained t-shirt,  
“He is disgraceful.”  
Jack can’t suppress his laughter, which surprises them both.  
He leans in, immediately being hit with the scent of various perfumes, fast food joints, overindulgent gigs, and other boys, then whispers,  
“I adore your shirt. Don’t tell.”  
“Would you like to keep it?” Mal asks, and he imagines that he's a bit breathless.  
“Don’t be silly. Curtis would throw a fit at me.”  
“Is his name really Wild?”  
“Yes. He’s very proud of that- But if you’d like to get under his skin, his middle name is Anthony.”  
“You’re falling asleep.”  
Jack's lids are heavy and he pulls away, but Malcolm stops him, for a brief moment, before showing a rare expression of embarrassment. He realizes suddenly how young he is, and how much younger he appears.  
“Go to bed.” He says stiffly.  
“We haven’t discussed the show."  
He smiles through picked, scabbed lips,  
“We’ll do it for five thousand.”  
“Three.”  
“Three thousand, five hundred.”  
“Alright, it’s a deal.”  
Jack shakes his hand, and notes the look of impossible relief that Malcolm is trying to hide: He knows perfectly well how little the Creatures are usually paid, and how often. Hopefully, the bulk of this paycheck will be spent on new equipment and real food, not drugs- But there's little use in hoping.  
Jack gets to his feet with a groan of exhaustion, and tries to rub a bit of the headache out of his temples.  
“Hey- D’you mind if I crash here? I’m not sure I’ve got enough to take the cab back, and it’s kind of cold to walk.”  
He turns to see him smiling awkwardly, ankles crossed.  
“Absolutely, you cannot sleep on a couch. I’ll give you the money, then you can go home and sleep in a real bed.”  
Malcolm smiles ruefully,  
“We don’t exactly have beds- Well, that’s not true, we have a bed. But it’s my night on the floor- We can only fit three people in it at once.”  
“Oh- I see. Well, here’s the cab fare for the morning- Let me get you a blanket.”  
“You don’t have to mother me too, I’m not pathetic.”  
Jack pauses in the doorway. Malcolm seems almost antagonized by the suggestion of a quilt, his lips pressed in a thin line.  
“Well,” Jack says icily, “Neither is Curt. But both of you need somewhere to sleep.” And with that, he turns away.  
Malcolm's body sinks into the couch as he removes his coat, while Jack locates a fluffy, dingy blanket buried in the back of the hall closet.


	3. Still Feel Your Hair, Black Ribbons of Coal

The first thing he’s aware of is the stinging ache coming from his hands. He lifts his head from the pillow in slow motion and turns his palms right side up- Dull, rust-colored blood has crept up through the tightly wound gauze, leaving sticky stains around the edges.  
Sunlight, the first bit of it after two weeks of rain, is beginning to peek hesitantly through the blinds. His T.V., his radio, a few of Jack’s paintings, a cheaply made children’s book shelf, and a bottle of vodka all lay in twisted, mangled piles on the carpet, shining and shadowed like wreckage from a ship. There are two distinct dents in the wall- One only a crack, the other having broken through the plaster. He remembers them vaguely, from when he’d first gotten the news, and when he looks down again he realizes his hands are a maze of cuts, scabs, and scrapes, not only limited to the deep slices on his palms.  
Then he remembers that Brian is alive.  
Very gently, he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, reaching out for a pair of sandals that had stayed hidden safely beneath the nightstand. He gets to his feet, freezing in nothing but a pair of boxers, and experiences a firework of stinging, aching darts of pain. Looking down, he finds that there are also cuts and scratches along his stomach and chest, ranging from thin slits to gouges, the deepest about an inch. He touches one, and winces.  
“Jesus Christ.”  
Then carefully, so, so carefully, Curt begins to pick his way over the gnarled remains of his former fresh start. He has the sense that maybe if he moves with enough care, with enough guilt, maybe he can apologize to Jack for terrorizing him. Ruining the tiny apartment he can barely pay for. Maybe he can apologize to Brian for being exactly what everyone had said he was: A raging, irresponsible fuck up. Maybe he can undo it all- Every second, everything he’d said and done that had gotten him here. Without Bijou music, without his band, without any money, and maybe, even, without Jack Fairy- maybe he’s dried it all up. Maybe he can find a way to no longer exist.  
Beyond his door he can hear the sound of low, pleasant conversation. He opens it just a crack and sees Malcolm and Jack, both of whom appear very old ladyish with their cups of tea and their whispery, scandalous speaking. They’re sitting on the couch together half-watching some T.V. show, obviously more immersed in the upcoming Death Of Glitter gig and the gossip surrounding the other acts than the program.  
Jack’s eyes flutter away from Malcolm’s face to land, like a beam of divine light, on Curt’s.  
“Oh! You’re awake. Let’s change those bandages.”  
Malcolm’s eyes become bright, gleaming like blue bottle glass, but he doesn’t say a word.  
Jack gets to his feet, already perfectly dressed for his day: A blouse, slacks, and meticulous doe-eyed makeup. Curt grunts, but his cheeks warm at the way Jack smiles at him. He wants to cry. He wants to throw up. He wants to get out, he needs to score. Jack isn’t even mad at him, and, changing from his house slippers to his one pair of durable sneakers, seems happy to wade back in the direction of the bathroom and locate the gauze.  
“I’ll just be a minute,” He says, and Curt nods.

The T.V. is still on. As he looks down at his ridiculous, sandaled feet, he hears a newscaster begin her report. He’s getting decent at German, but even if he’d had no fucking idea how to speak the language he’d still know what she was talking about.  
“Brian Slade now facing legal action……………Brian Slade has not left London home in……….Brian Slade to host Teen PopSweep Awards…….Brian Slade, cocaine…………”  
Jack reenters the room and swiftly approaches the television, turning it off and giving Malcolm the ugliest look Curt has ever seen on his face.  
“So it’s true?” His voice is without sound.  
Jack leads him to the tiny adjacent kitchen area and plunks him down on a step stool, the TV out of his line of sight.  
“Yes. He’s fine.”  
“Unfortunately.” Malcolm mumbles, low enough to pretend they can’t hear him. He’s now flicking through the stations, his cheek propped against the palm of his hand, listless without Jack’s attention.  
“Maybe you should shut the fuck up.” Curt snaps.  
A piece of gauze is peeled away, revealing a pale-edged, softly pulsing cut,  
“Curt, please-“  
“Why is he still here?”  
“Well that’s really fucking nice.” He mutters.  
Curt turns his attention back to Jack, and notices, for the first time, the tired lines beginning to form around his mouth.  
“Why do you think he did it?” He whispers, trying to catch his gaze.  
He begins to replace the gauze on his other hand, finished with the first.  
“He pulled it to sell records, he’s completely out of his mind on coke and it’s looking like he might be dropped from Bijou. I don’t know anything more than what you heard on the television.”  
“But what do you think?”  
Jack’s eyes go from weary to cold.  
“You don’t want to know.”  
He finishes, then stands, wiping his palms on his slacks.  
“You’re all patched up. I’d recommend stitches, but-“  
“No. No hospital.”  
Curt pushes himself up and flexes his hands.  
“I think I’m gonna go out for a while.” He says, as though this needs to be announced. Already, he’s starting to feel sick, shaky and surreal. He can’t stand to sit in here and feel them thinking about Brian, or him, or any of it. Already he can feel it oozing from Malcolm, coating the inside of his head like half-digested caramel.  
“Curt,” Jack says, but says nothing else. At this point, anything he does to keep Curt away from heroin would be akin to handing a lifejacket to a drowned corpse.  
“Gonna go get dressed.”  
He shakes his hair back into his face and reenters the bedroom, which is sunnier and more disgusting. Shirt, pants, wallet, boots, jacket, past Jack, past Malcolm, into the thin sun that will be rain again in an hour, then out, onwards, and up. Every pulse hurts his hands, and every step is a minute closer to not feeling it. Out. Out. Out. Out. Out. Out.


	4. Touch My Skin To Keep Me Whole

Jack clenches his jaw as the door slams.  
“Why are you in love with him?” Malcolm asks.  
“I don’t know.” He whispers, and feels heady, light, overwhelmed by the strangeness of his own implosion, the implosion of the world he’d helped to make and they’d lived in for so short a time.  
“Hey- Slow down.” Malcolm jumps up from the couch and grabs his wrist, leading him towards a red-striped chair by the living room window.   
He helps him into it, and Jack flashes a surprisingly strong smile.  
Malcolm doesn’t smile back. His eyes have turned the color of the thick gray frost coating the edges of the windowpane.   
“You have to let him go.”  
“I know I do.”  
“I’m afraid he’s really hurting you.”  
“It’s over, Malcolm. We’re all getting hurt.”  
The tears are not delicate but harsh, wracking, like a cough.  
Malcolm falls to his knees and wraps his arms around him like a little child, his cheek pressing against Jack’s heaving chest.  
“I’m sorry to cry.” He says.  
Malcolm just shakes his head.  
“You’re human, too.”


	5. If Only You'd Come Back To Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may still tweak this, but I've been editing it for about two to three weeks and I'm tired of it so I'm passing it out to you all. Enjoy. It is currently very late at night.

She knew Curt was different the first time she saw him. Really saw him, alone, without the entourage or the black hole of Brian’s personality. Before that she’d only handled him, along with everyone else, patiently putting up with the tantrums and the fuming and the excessive drinking that distracted him from smack, until it didn’t. “A dog in a shock collar,” Trevor had called him once, and though he wasn’t known for being articulate she couldn’t think of a better analogy. If fame, money, and drugs were the collar, Brian and Jerry acted as the boundary, and upon many years reflection, she decided she must have been the doghouse. 

She never painted herself as an unsung hero, but she did have seemingly hundreds of memories of slapping Curt awake, pouring freezing water on him, hoisting him to a sitting position and them walking him up and down the halls hours before he had to perform. Brian would be struck dumb, conscious but out of his mind- Never sober enough to help, never fucked up enough to die. When the lovebirds fought, it was her room Curt would appear in, drenched in sweat that stank of alcohol and twitching in an attempt to control his rage. He freaked out on everyone, Jerry, Trevor, Shannon, everyone but her and Brian. And even when he started screaming at Brian, he was never anything but polite to her, though sometimes she knew it was only by a hair.  
“I just don’t feel like he wants me to be a person,” He said to her once, after a particularly nasty fight, his fingers clenching and twitching as he paced,  
“It’s like I’m performing, all the time.”  
“I know what you mean.” She said, and she did.  
“He just gets so quiet sometimes. I don’t know what he’s thinking. Then he’s normal, the next day, like nothing happened. He won’t tell me anything, he never has.” He lit a cigarette, but shook so hard it fell to the floor, smoking briefly before he ground it out.  
“He’s just thinking up his next brilliant scheme, darling. Don’t worry too much.”  
“I do anyway.”  
She leaned back on her pillows, and looked up at the dimly lit ceiling. A mural of chubby cherubs frolicked in a china blue sky.   
“He loves you, you know. He thinks you’re a God.”  
Curt sighed and laid down beside her, so she could feel the trembling in his shoulders.  
“I know.”

She decided later that that was what got to Brian. Curt’s godhood, or really, his potential godhood, the fact that he was the personification of everything Brian had been envying for twenty-four years. There were many people who were minor deities in his eyes, but aside from Jack Fairy and Oscar Wilde he knew no other Gods but himself- And even he, in his infinite star-crossed glory, was not American. Curt bloomed in front of him and represented not the warm, compact suburbs where Mandy herself was from, not the dated hippie nonsense of California, not the rampant backwater brand of Christianity that had caused people to burn the Beatles, but a kind of chaotic anarchy that took him beyond fascination and into obsession.   
That first night, when they slept on the dewy festival grounds beneath their coats and scarves, he’d sat shivering beside the lake until dawn.  
“What do you think he’s doing?”  
“….Who, love?”  
“That boy. Curt Wild.”  
“Off fucking some delightfully under-age beauty, I’m sure.”  
Brian’s eyes were clear and black, reflecting the water.  
“I don’t think he’s like that.” He cast a stone, throwing ripples across the surface.  
“You just don’t want him to be. You don’t want him to be a bonafide rock n roll hetero sex symbol. ”  
“You didn’t see the way he looked at me,” She suddenly had his full attention,  
“You didn’t see what I saw. He’s the Devil, Mandy, and he’s after me.”  
“And aren’t you like the fair Persephone, kneeling in your lovely gown?” Cecil was awake now, trying to get comfortable against the tree trunk he was propped against.  
“Hades isn’t the Devil.” Brian spat, then was silent.  
Mandy was dozing when he spoke again, and by then it was dawn. She realized, slowly, that he was crying.  
“They despised him.”  
“When you’re abused like that, you know, you’ve touched the stars.”  
“I just wish it had been me. I wish I had thought of it.”  
He glanced at her, then glanced away, and continued tearing at the grass beneath him. His fingers were dirty, black beneath the nails, cold from the night air. She smiled.  
“You will, love. You will.”  
He laughed, and hauled himself to his feet.  
“I won’t. It’s already been done,” He looked back towards the festival which was slowly, arduously being taken apart,  
“I’ll just have to think up something better.”  
He wiped his hands on his skirt and disappeared.  
“He’s in love,” Cecil said, “With neither one of us.”  
Mandy wrapped her coat around her shoulders.  
“I give them a week.”

She knew, after that night, that something was different: Though she herself was never that far gone, even in the thick of it, when everything was peach champagne and smoke and Jerry presiding over them with his expensive cigars. Even as she began to believe they were immortal, she knew that Curt wasn’t. He smelt of real things, old things, things from her childhood. Leather and cigarette smoke. Rancid Dollar General perfume from the States, which he’d brought as a joke and worn only because Brian hated it. He didn’t play along, and what was worse, he didn’t like the game. 

Mandy was not, maybe even lacked the ability to be, a possessive person. She didn’t get jealous, or at least, didn’t expect to and found it funny when she did. She didn’t even concern herself with the chosen couple: There was a lot to do, managing the less romantic parts of the Slade extravaganza. Things not even Jerry would touch, like feuds between the staff, and issues with the wardrobe, and tipping the maids so they wouldn’t quit immediately upon entering Curt’s room. The Sin Den, as she called it. Dirty sheets, fur throws, ashtrays overflowing and empty bottles kicked under the dresser; All of Brian’s favorite books, his clothes, sometimes him, wearing half a dress shirt, looking rumpled and sleepy as he pulled an outfit together. She did miss seeing that, sometimes- Watching him screw up his mouth as he slid on his shoes. She’d trusted their unspoken agreement, even as Cecil had prophesized against it. No matter who it is, you still come back. You’re still partners, linked energies, other halves, and all that nonsense. There was a time when she believed it was temporary- It wasn’t like Brian, in the grand tradition of Oscar Wilde, didn’t have all-consuming infatuations. But she knew, most likely before even he knew, when the infatuation stage had passed.

That night, Curt was wasted, really genuinely not-for-show wasted, up in his room after a gig. She remembered it because it was the first time he’d cut himself, and the only time while he and Brian were together. Someone threw a bottle-Unheard of, at a Maxwell Demon show- It broke, and he picked it up. Simple, she told Brian in the car afterwards, when Curt was all stitched up and sleeping against the door. He had been fine, proud, even. Laughing, barely wincing at the stitches, too drunk to feel them. But Brian was shaken. His lip trembled and for the first time in almost a year, he held her hand and stroked it.  
“Really, love. This is just the kind of thing he does…And it got a response, that’s what’s important.”  
The crowd had been mesmerized, a cloud of silence followed by a burst of noise, as Curt followed it up by throwing himself onto the drum set.  
Brian wasn’t listening. His other hand was curled around Curt’s like a white spider. By then he’d been silent for about an hour, hiding up in his head.  
“I’ve never seen anyone do something like that before,” He said slowly, “And now, it’s a part of his myth.”  
She smiled at him.  
“It is. That’s who he is.”  
Brian looked at her and didn’t see her. He saw something else, infinitely distant.  
“No, it isn’t. That’s just who they want him to be.”  
Curt stirred, and he turned away.

The minute they were home, Jerry called an emergency meeting in his office, just him and Brian alone.  
Mandy escorted Curt upstairs herself, since she didn’t trust him on the steps, and didn’t want him to sit bleeding and gaping in the foyer.

The minute she opened the door to his room, Curt propelled himself forward, barreling up onto the dresser. He began to hum, kicking his feet and picking at his stitches.  
“Don’t touch those, love,” She said, sinking into an armchair with a tear down the back. Her metallic silver wig was beginning to cut into her scalp, so she slipped it off and chucked it onto the bed. Curt dropped to the floor immediately and grabbed it, pulling it on over his head and grinning at her.  
“Some show tonight, huh?” He sat down at the foot of the bed and continued to kick.  
“It was really something,” She combed her fingers through her hair, rubbing at the sore places,   
“But I’m afraid you’re in quite a bit of trouble.”  
“I’m afraid you’re in quite a bit of trouble. Big Brother doesn’t appreciate your naked displays of carnality, Mr. Wild. We’re going to have to send you back to the shit hole.” He slung the wig at her, making her laugh.  
He paused, and became thoughtful.  
“D’you think that’s what they’re talking about? Sending me back.”   
She scoffed, and dropped her accent.  
“Are you kidding? Brian would sooner crucify himself. He’s obsessed with you, darling, positively obsessed. Besides, you’re under contract and midway through recording.”  
Curt shrugged, and focused very hard on widening the hole left by a cigarette on the duvet.  
“Stranger things have happened.”  
“Believe me, my husband would never let you go without a fight.”   
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” A dark light came into Curt’s eyes: Not resentment, or pride, just a kind of glow, like he was hiding something inside his chest. She wondered if she’d ever looked like that before, and lit a cigarette.  
“You just about broke his heart this evening, with your little stunt.”   
“How so?”  
“You gored yourself. We both know Brian likes to do the goring on his own terms.”  
Curt fell onto his back, hands stretching up to brush the pillows.  
“You’re really mean to him, y’know.”  
“It’s only what he deserves.”  
Curt began to whistle, bye bye Miss American Pie, took the Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry…  
“Y’know, I never wanted to come here.”  
“You didn’t?”  
“Nah. But I had nothing else going on, and this scene is cool enough.”  
“Well, are you happy you came?”  
“Not always.”  
She glanced at the door, wondering idly when Jerry was going to release Brian so he could come babysit. Her feet hurt.  
“What’s so bad about it?  
He sat up on his elbows and caught her eye. In his face she saw a kind of grim patience, like he’d brushed away the clouds and exposed time ticking past them, beyond them, out from beneath them.  
“It won’t last, and I feel sorry for us. You can’t change the world, you can only change yourself. But I don’t think any of us want to change.”  
She thought a moment, and swallowed an oddly sizable lump in her throat.   
“That’s no reason to hurt Brian.”  
Curt’s animosity drained and he shook his head, eyes softening to a wide dark blue.  
“No,” He muttered, and moved his fingers to the stitches,  
“No. I’m not gonna hurt him.”  
Then the door opened with a quiet squeal, and he stepped into the room, looking dead and old and already gone.  
“Hello darling,” He said, then spotted Mandy,  
“Oh! Hi there. No big deal, just a bit of a lecture.” He rolled his eyes, but she could see he was sore. She stood to leave, and glanced away when Curt rolled over and grabbed his hand, tugging him, his eyes still soft with tunnel-vision.   
“Thank you for bringing him up.” He said to her.  
“It’s no trouble. Just don’t pick those stitches, darling- Big Brother will want you in one piece for the conference tomorrow.” She gave Brian a peck on the cheek, then swept out of the room.  
“Goodnight!”

As she walked down the hall towards her bedroom, she heard Brian laugh, and Curt’s voice rise and fall and rise again like the lapping of the sea. She wondered how he could enjoy himself, knowing what he knew. She wondered how she could, either, but she figured she’d find ways to forget. The sun would come up, the wig would be retrieved, the day would start. The goring was going to come, and she accepted it with as much grace as she could muster. Above her head, the cherubs faded into sleep.

* * *

Less than eighteen months later, Mandy is sitting across from Curt in a bar, about two blocks away from the empty house.  
“So, you’re going back?”  
“Yeah.”  
“To Michigan, or-?”  
“I was thinking more like New York.”  
She traces her finger around the lip of her glass.  
“Oh.”  
“I might be fed up with Europe, but that’s no reason to go home.”  
He smiles, broadly, but there are tiny lines forming at the corners of his eyes. He’s only twenty-twenty what? Twenty-seven? Younger than her, but older.   
“I’ll miss you, Curt.”  
He takes her hand. His is warm, rough, black beneath the nails. His smile is gentle, just for her.  
“I’ll miss you, too.”


	6. If You'd Lay At My Side

It’s late, maybe one or two in the morning, and the door is locked- Either locked, or frozen shut. His hands burn and ache as he tugs at the knob, too high to feel the cold anywhere else.  
“Jack,” He whispers, “C’mon, motherfucker.”  
When rattling the knob doesn’t work he kicks, hard, and pieces of icicle shatter across his face. He tries to remember how long he’s been gone this time; It could’ve been a day, it could’ve been a decade, and judging by the black silent street it could’ve been so long that he’s walked himself to the end of time.   
Curt knocks again.  
“OPEN UP!”  
The door opens with a soft icy crunch, and he’s hit with a burst of sweet cinnamon heat.  
Cinnamon, hand cream, incense, a slight street-produced undercurrent of garbage. He smiles with relief.  
Two clear, blue eyes beam up at him from the depths of an oversized quilt.  
“What the fuck do you want?”  
He realizes with a sinking feeling who he’s talking to.  
“I live here.”  
He pushes past Malcolm and strips off his jacket, scarf, boots, socks, throwing them around wildly in an attempt to expose himself to the heat as fast as possible.   
“You need to keep your fucking voice down, Jack is sick.”  
“Sick with what?” He asks, pushing his hands up under his shirt and groaning at the stinging warmth. Malcolm follows behind him, his slippers padding softly on the threadbare carpet.  
“Something respiratory- I think it’s pneumonia and he should get it checked out, but he won’t listen.”  
“Jack’s always sick, just go to bed.”  
Curt falls onto a rose-and-hummingbird patterned loveseat and curls up like a child, elbow under his cheek. He yawns, already feeling the warm underbelly of sleep brushing over his face, kneading into his stomach and shoulders like a big fat cat.  
“You think I don’t know that? I wouldn’t be begging him to fucking check in if it wasn’t a big fucking deal. He won’t eat, or get out of bed, and he can barely breathe- Fucking worrying over you, every second he’s awake, asking if you’ve come back. I was tempted to tell him you’d OD’d in a ditch but it might’ve killed him.”  
“I was just squatting.” Curt says. He doesn’t really remember where he’s been. Various dark, cold places filled with vaporous, drifting people; No names, no faces, occasionally a smile made out of a fold of cracked deep-set flesh. He’s been high, almost on a binge but not quite, because it’s harder to find dealers when it’s so cold.   
“You don’t need to squat,” Malcolm hisses through small, rat-like teeth, “You have somewhere to fucking live. It’s been two fucking weeks.”  
“Can’t shoot up here. I can do it there, and stay a while.”  
“Well, isn’t that just perfect for you.”  
He tucks his nose into the crook of his elbow, but Malcolm doesn’t move. He just stands there, hovering in the stillness like a small gray ghost.  
“Is there something else?”  
“I just don’t get it. I just don’t understand.”  
He turns on his heel and disappears through the mouth of the hallway.  
Curt falls asleep as the door to Jack’s room closes.

In his dream this time, everything is pale and warm, a sort of shifting sinkhole of sea and sand, light and street. Curt is lying back against the sand, listening to the waves that sound like both footsteps and radio static, reaching out towards him. This boy is faceless, but they all sort of resemble Brian, or his brother, or his mother, the only three people who appear in his dreams. The boy is younger than him by a lot- he can’t be older than thirteen, and he’s speaking in a crackling undercurrent. Part of his body begins climbing into the ocean, but his head stays, caught by his eyes.   
“The pin- I want you to keep it. The pin- I want you to keep it. The pin- I want you to keep it.”  
Curt unconsciously touches his chest, where he always keeps the pin.  
“Why?”  
The boy’s neck breaks and he collapses. 

Something like an explosion hits him in the chest. Curt sits up on the loveseat as the watery light of dawn filters through the window and exposes Malcolm, fully dressed, picking up pieces of a shattered planter.  
“Help me with this, will you?” He gets to his feet, but seems to have trouble doing it, like his knees are too weak to hold him properly.  
“What’s going on?”   
“Just pick this shit up.”  
He heads back towards the direction of Jack’s room, and when Curt kneels to pick up the ceramic he sees Malcolm helping Jack into a pair of clunky, heavy-tread shoes. Or at least, someone with Jack’s haircut- The person he’s holding upright is wizened, a wooden frame wrapped with white tissue paper. The dummy’s eyes have a film over them as they fall onto Curt’s face, which is still sticky with drool.   
The only sound is Malcolm fumbling into his coat, and the dense, heavy wheeze emanating from Jack’s chest as he grips his arm.  
He leads him out into the hallway, towards the door, barely giving Curt time to stand up.  
“Hey- Don’t rush him-“  
Jack looks like he’s about to collapse.  
“Help me get him to the car,” Malcolm mutters. The car. Jack’s prized piece of shit car, which he could not drive but Curt could, the only vehicle he’d ever owned besides a scooter in second grade. The car they didn’t really need living in Berlin but which had been ‘a steal’, and made them feel more grown up, and less like oversized children living in a cardboard house. Curt finds his jacket and shoes, then takes Jack’s elbow.  
“Don’t leave- A mess of my coatrack.” Jack breathes as they inch out into the snow.  
“I’m sure the rest of the society girls will let it go if they happen to drop by.” Malcolm says dryly, but when Curt looks at him his eyes are full of tears.


	7. Wouldn't Need No Mojo Pin, To Keep Me Satisfied

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> like and subscribe this chapter fucking broke my brain

Double pneumonia, they’d told Mal. Good thing they’d brought him in- A couple more weeks holed up in his room and Jack’s condition would’ve been fatal. Now that he has an IV in him he’s stabilizing, and for a healthy person, improvement would’ve been evident after about three to five days.  
However, for Jack, there’s a chance he may not be able to participate in the Death Of Glitter show, let alone go home by the end of the week.  
“Why different for Jack?” Mal had asked in his stilted German the morning they brought him in, trying not to let the panic show in his voice. His improvement had been incredible after only an hour on the IV- Enough so that Mal had finally let himself relax after four days in an anxious hell.  
The doctor had given him a detached, antiseptic smile, one that made it clear he was looking forward to washing his hands of the whole thing.  
“The biggest problem is that he’s had lifelong issues with asthma, and he’s a smoker. His lungs are already weaker than they should be, even when he’s in good health. All of that combined with something like pneumonia, well…It’s going to be rougher on him.”  
“He’s strong.”  
“Obviously, and I’m making sure he receives the proper care, which is the best I can do for you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to…”  
He’d wanted to say more. Play into his role, tell him that money was no object, call for more tests, fly in a new doctor from Australia or Hawaii, demand a second opinion. But as the doctor walked away, he found he could do nothing but stare after him, feeling for all the world like a castaway watching a rescue plane soar off into the distance.   
A nurse ducked into Jack’s room just as Curt ducked out, groggy and flecked with blonde stubble. He glanced at Mal sheepishly. He looked wildly different from the first night Mal had met him: His skin was waxy-yellow, vacuum sealed to his skull, and his forehead was red with scabbed zits.  
“So, I guess you’re staying?” He’d asked in a low tone. Even his voice, usually strong and obstinate, sounded drained.  
“Well, I’m not gonna abandon him. I assume you are.”  
“I’m sure you would put it that way.”  
“Yeah, I would. I don’t know what else to call it- Your best friend is in the hospital, maybe dying, and you leave him behind.”  
Curt spent a long time looking at him. Too long, and with a kind of clarity that didn’t match his wax-figure face at all. Mal realized, with a terrified jolt, that Curt pitied him, and was so enraged and strangely crushed by that idea that he just stared at the floor.  
“I know you’ll look after him better than me.”  
He’d turned and walked out without another word, and Mal had felt it again, the shadow of wings gliding over his tiny sun-swept island.  
He pressed his hand against the door and opened it, gingerly. The nurse was adjusting the IV, Jack was asleep. However exhausted Curt’s face was, Jack’s was white- Dead and colorless, like a chemically cured cadaver. Mal entered, scooted the closest chair up to the bed, and dropped his head onto the mattress.  
“Leave us alone.”

In the week before he was admitted, Jack and Mal had talked. Or rather, Mal had talked, and Jack had listened politely, eyes warm and amiable over the rim of his coffee mug. It wasn’t really that he wanted to tell him his life’s story, to drop in on him like an adopted neurotic- It was just that it was cold, and blustery, and he didn’t have anywhere else that he wanted to be.  
“You’re sure you’re not sick of me?” He’d asked on the third night after Curt had disappeared, the first night they’d shared a bed. The radiator busted and Jack took to getting chills after the sun set, so Mal had offered himself and a space heater as comfort.  
“Get sick of you? How could I?” He was pressed closed to him, long and thin and strangely warm. He remembers with a dizzying jolt how soft Jack had felt, shoulder to shoulder, one shaved leg crossed over Malcolm’s knee.   
“I’ve been informed by my band that I’m a bit of a talker.”  
“No, just sociable. It’s nice to be around someone who can make conversation- Though if I may complain about something, dear, you must change out of this dreadful coat eventually.”  
“Am I starting to smell?”  
Jack had smiled sleepily, eyelashes dipping onto his cheeks.  
“Oh, just a little.”  
A bit embarrassed, he’d tried to move away, only to be pulled back.  
“Not that badly, dear, stay with me.”  
Malcolm had barely slept, his skin felt so warm and frantic.

At one point, to placate Jack, he did go back to the old flat to collect a bag of clothes and novels. On the way out he’d scrawled a note,  
AT JACK FAIRY’S. WARM AND DRY. – MALCOLM.  
On a yellow slab of post its, but he knew it didn’t make much of a difference whether he did it or not. The Creatures regularly disappeared for weeks at a time, so he was sure they weren’t worrying about him. To entertain Jack one evening, he’d told him the story of the time Ray had gone missing for a whole month, right up until they had to leave for Berlin. They’d woken up, grabbed their luggage and a stand-in bassist named Sal, and opened the front door to find Ray standing there shirtless with half his head shaved. He’d explained, in a way that made it sound trite, that his now ex-girlfriend had tried to get him to join an anarcho-punk cult.  
“Found out a bit too late they wanted to mess with my hair. Oh- We’ve got a gig then today, have we?”  
It was enough to convince Jack that no one would mind if Mal stayed a little while longer.

But not everything revolved around Mal, or the Creatures, or Curt, or even the show. On the late nights, the bad ones, when Jack’s anxiety got the better of him and he would sit up waiting for Curt, he would relax into a different side of himself. In a low, sardonic voice he’d described a childhood spent clamped to an inhaler, suffered breathlessly in bed, or else hacking up pieces of his lungs in hospital lobbies.  
“I made Andy Warhol look like an Olympian.” He’d said, then laughed, before it turned into the low rattling cough that had become the staple of his latest ‘house cold’.  
Jack was the type who got a house cold in November and it lasted until March. In the final three days he’d spent at home he’d refused to eat properly, sleep early, or do much more than take hot baths and exist on throat lozenges.   
“So I’ve got the sniffles. It’s been raining for three weeks- Who doesn’t?” His stubbornness put a light into his eyes that, while infuriating, was mesmerizing. Mal found that he really couldn’t argue when Jack looked at him like that, found for the first time in his life that he wasn’t interested in arguing.  
He’d played into it. Reveled in it. Deluded himself into believing that he was changing something, switching the dynamic- Taking care of Jack as opposed to running him down, like Curt was, though as lovely as their evenings together were he could always feel him. He knew they both felt him, an uncertain, immovable shadow that caused Jack to spring out of bed all hours of the night, just to see if the raccoon in the garbage can might’ve been him. But then again, is Mal really hypocritical enough to believe he’s not as bad as Jack is?

He’s had plenty of opportunities, but he hasn’t left the hospital for three days. When Jack regains the ability to be fully conscious he doesn’t want him to see him like this; Greasy, hungry, hollowed out, but he can’t help it. If Curt would come back, he would take a break. Go out to lunch. Go home and cry. But he hasn’t seen him since the morning they checked him in. He’s starting to think it would be better if he were the one sitting here, playing the frantic husband in a daytime drama.  
If Jack woke up and found Curt in Malcolm’s shape it would probably be enough to cure him, like a miracle tonic or a sip from the fountain of youth.  
He bites his lip until tastes blood, thinking about Curt’s smile, the one he used on Jack whenever he was in trouble. The way Jack’s eyes, so listless on Malcolm’s face in the rare moments when he was conscious, would light up at the sight of it.  
He grits his teeth as he straightens the sheet covering Jack’s chest, accidentally knocking his elbow into the IV stand.  
Jack’s brow furrows and his eyes open, brighter and clearer than they’ve been for the past seventy-two hours. He blinks and attempts to sit up, squinting at Mal.  
“Dear God,” He says thickly, then swallows,  
“Go take a shower.”  
“How do you feel?”  
“Right as rain,” He smiles, a thin gray line, then looks around himself a bit too quizzically.   
“He’s not here,” Mal says, “But he’s okay.” He hopes for both their sakes that that’s true.  
Jack nods, looking abashed, and folds his hands on top of his chest.  
“How sick am I?” He asks. There’s a little quirk in the corner of his mouth, and Mal knows that no matter what, even if he has to spring from his own coffin, Jack will be headlining Death Of Glitter as God intended. The thought makes him grin.  
“They say you shouldn’t do the gig- Any of the gigs. They say you’re pretty bad off.”  
He breathes a sigh.  
“Fools.”  
Mal snickers, and Jack’s smile widens. For a moment, it seems like everything is okay: The dense, heavy weight of thinking and planning and worrying has been hoisted out of the room. Then he notices Jack’s eyes roaming again, spinning like planets lost from orbit. Slow, agonizing hurt begins to tear itself, petal by petal, inside Mal’s chest until he’s staring at the floor, at the toes of his worn black boots, anywhere but at Jack’s needy lovesick face.   
“I’m happy you’re awake,” He says coolly, trying not to let anything bleed into his voice,  
“I didn’t think you’d ever make sense again.”  
Jack’s eyes fix on the air vent above them. His breathing is controlled but ragged.  
“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”  
“You just won’t try,” He doesn’t mean to be mean, but his shoulders are shaking,  
“He’s given you plenty of opportunities.”  
“Malcolm, I’m in the hospital and I don’t particularly want to debate this. What in the world do you want me to do?”  
He swallows, and is surprised to find a lump there, big around as an egg. Shame rises in his chest, He’s sick and you’re acting like a child,  
“Kick him out. Stop worrying all the time. Let him fend for himself for once.” Fend for me instead.  
A tiny sigh of impatience.  
“He’s not the one who put me here.”  
“No, but you have to admit that searching for him in the rain, waiting up for him, combing the news-“  
“I never asked you to help me with any of that.” Jack’s voice is placid, but he can feel the humiliation simmering beneath the surface.  
“That’s not the point,” He spits, then leans back as the nurse pops her head in through the door,  
“Everything okay?” She asks in heavily accented English.  
“We’re fine, thank you.” Jack answers in German, and she smiles appreciatively as she closes the door. It had been pretty obvious lately that she’d gotten sick of adapting herself to speak to Mal.  
When her footsteps die away, he continues in a low tone,  
“You can’t save him. You told me yourself, nobody can stop Curt from doing what he wants.”  
“Must we really do this right now?” His eyes are closed, the lids a faint, raw violet.  
“No. You need to eat something.” Mal rises to call the nurse, his muscles aching and twitching from hours in the same chair. Jack looks up at him.  
“I’m not a child. I know I can’t save him. I think his problem is that he’s finally realized the one person who could save him has abandoned him. For that, I love him completely…But I’m not his soulmate, and I understand why he doesn’t love me. I don’t ask him to love me, but I do, very deeply, care for him.”  
Jack settles back against his pillow, having said his piece. Mal feels like he’s just been slapped.  
“So,” He forces himself to speak, “You think Brian Slade was his soulmate?”  
“You don’t believe in them, you cynic?” Jack smiles, eyes flashing. Mal watches the ghost of a dimple dip into his cheek. He sinks back into his chair, his knees watery.  
“I don’t believe in only one. I didn’t think Curt was the kind of person who believed in them at all.”  
Jack snorts, then coughs his good humor out of himself.  
“He isn’t. He doesn’t have any idea about what he feels. But I can recognize energy when I see it, and certain blends of energy, when they touch each other. When I first saw Curt he was as deep and bloody red of anyone I ever met. Dear God, he was so hurt. He still is. The color hasn’t changed- If anything, it’s starting to spread. Perhaps some of it has gotten inside me, inside all of us.”  
Jack’s hand slides across the sheet, brittle and bruised, and Mal takes it without thinking.  
“What color am I?”  
He’s quiet a moment.  
“You’ve always looked very purple. Nearly black.”  
“Is that bad?”  
“It’s unsettling considering how young you are. You should be bright pink, or yellow.”  
Mal runs his thumb over the blue, threadlike veins gracing the backs of Jack’s hands. I love him completely. I do care for him, very deeply. He tries to think of something to say, anything to keep them off the subjects of Curt and Brian Slade.  
“I can talk to ghosts.”  
A hum of approval.  
“Really? I never was very good at that. I’m too liminal myself- They think I’m one of them, and so have nothing to say.”  
Malcolm closes his eyes and tries to tap into them, the strange murmurings and rustlings he’d been hearing in the back of his head since childhood, his best friends. The room is blue-gray and shadowed with evening, and quiet besides Jack’s wheezing. The rattling is faint, but it’s there, like paper tubes being dragged up and down the walls. He smiles to himself, at the familiar pang of loneliness he feels, the nostalgia that comes with calling to them.  
“Is there one here now?” Jack asks.  
“Uh-huh.”  
“Who?”  
Mal closes his eyes and hums, trying to draw out the sound.   
“Sylvia Plath, I think. But she’s just passing through.”  
“Tell her I thought The Bell Jar was a frightful bore.”  
He opens his eyes and meets Jack’s.  
“You have such lovely eyes, you know. If only you wouldn’t cake all that black stuff on them, you’d look like Bette Davis.”  
“You need to eat something.”  
“Be a prince and tell her I need some soup.”  
Mal sets his feet on the floor and stands up. He leans down and kisses Jack’s closed mouth, like it was a dare, like he had to prove something, and maybe, he thinks later, he did. He pulls back to find that Jack’s eyes are clear and calm, so dark they look like one solid color.  
“I think you need to rest.” His voice is quiet.  
“Jack, I need to-“  
“You look like you’ve been begging on a street corner.”  
Mal falls to his knees and presses his face into the sheet. After a few minutes, Jack reaches out, and runs his fingers gently through his hair. He begins to hum, broken and soft.  
Long ago  
And oh, so far away  
I fell in love with you  
Before the second show  
Your guitar  
Sounds so sweet and clear  
But you’re not really here  
It’s just the radio…

Mal doesn’t know the rest of the words but he lets the melody flow over him, and when Jack is finished he stands up, only a bit teary.   
“Go home,” Jack whispers, his lids heavy.  
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. And I’ll make sure they send you soup.”  
“I know,” He smiles, then catches Mal’s hand,  
“You really will come back?” The uncertainty in his voice ruins his control, and he knows he has about ten seconds before he breaks down for real.   
“Yes, I will. I promise.”   
Jack’s eyes close, and he drifts away.


	8. Don't Want To Weep For You, Don't Want To Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hi, since the last chapter I've read a book and five plays, finished my own play, done some art, written some songs, delved into some new albums, and seen more horror movies than I ever cared to see. I hit a writer's block working on some later chapters and I apologize for the wait. I also apologize for this being sort of short- I've been a bit embarrassed with the quality of my older chapters(though I have no intention of changing them or taking them down, I'm not crazy, they are what they are) so I was harder on my editing. This is very emo.

Jack’s place is lightless and drowsy without his presence. Though it’s only been three days, already the smell of it is changing, settling like thick dust. ‘This is a dead person’s house’, Mal thinks, then shakes the thought away as he straightens the coat rack. It looks like a wild animal has been trying to nest in it, half tipped over and with no room for his black coat. Not that he really wants to take it off in the first place- In fact, after weeks of using it as a shield, he wishes he could shower in it, live in it, mesh it with his own skin like a pelt; Sliding it over his shoulders feels like peeling off a layer of himself, like he’s one step closer to spilling his rotten apple innards all over the floor. He imagines the scene. Jack, being wheeled in on a respirator, brought home to die, wondering why he never came back. Malcolm black with flies and bloated with death, sprawled on the floor, everything in him seeping and pooling on the dull old linoleum. He shakes himself harder, rubbing at his face and inhaling deeply. Immediately he feels worse, permeated with death.   
He spots a vase of delicately crumpled white lilies sitting abandoned on the kitchen counter nearest the refrigerator. Their tips are brown, curled in, though still bound around the stems with the silky ribbon Jack had fixed them with. He realizes that they’re the worst of the smell: The ominous undertone of sweetly decaying flowers.  
“White lilies?”  
“My signature,” Pink lipstick smile, beaming over their rapidly wilting heads, “Curt bought them for me.”  
Mal trashes them, and heads to the bathroom.

Once inside he turns on the shower light, and has to fiddle with the knob several times to get the water to flow without making the pipes scream.  
Greenish-brownish mold is beginning to grow where the tile turns to wallpaper, ugly stuff with thin finger-y tentacles, most likely carrying the Black Death that Jack is being subjected to.  
“Should we get that mold in the bathroom checked out, Jackie?”  
“With whose money, dear?”  
He takes off his shirt and rumpled jeans, feeling acutely that he could be attacked at any moment. If he lets his guard slip even a second the ceiling will cave in, pouring rubble, glass, spiders and bones. ‘I ought to take something before I go back.’ He wonders, dully, if Curt has left any smack lying around. A new scene presents itself: Nodding out in his room, coming to and seeing the rainy light slide up and down the floor for hours, blissfully disconnected. It would make him hypocritical, but it would keep him from breaking down.

As the steam rises around him, his eyes move from the mold to the tiny, expensive rose-blossom shaped soap sitting on the corner of the tub. An uncommon splurge for Jack, a lapse in frugalness, a little gesture of love from the apartment towards Mal.  
All at once, Mal is hit with a burst of affection for the place. It’s like a halfway house for discarded queers, with holes in the carpet and beetles in the sink and Jack’s lovingly calculated attempts at grandeur. It feels like home, like coming home, like curling up in a cubbyhole and sleeping through the storm. His lids begin to dip, everything winding down slowly. Thunder clouds rolling over the flat brown fields, fat quarter-sized drops on the sizzling concrete steps, the smell of angry, short-lived rain...Him sitting on the porch with dirty fingers, watching it approach with a kind of religious anticipation, the house oozing warmth and comfort onto his back all the while...

He doesn’t realize it until he hears the crash, but he nods off, sitting huddled against the tiled wall with the steaming water flowing over him and pooling around the finicky drain. He thrashes like a cat as he gets to his feet, flipping over the rack of shampoos and conditioners that Jack has hanging beneath the showerhead.  
“Motherfucker! God fucking dammit.”   
He presses a hand to his chest and feels his heart jumping. The muffled crunch of porcelain breaking beneath Curt’s boots can be heard even over the rush of the water.  
“Malcolm?”  
“What.”  
“Uh- I kinda fucked up.”  
“You realize I haven’t had a shower in a week and I’ve been sleeping at the hospital for the past three days, right?”  
“It’s kind of a big deal.”  
Mal turns the water off and wraps himself in a towel, sliding on a pair of Jack’s house slippers and walking through Curt’s room to the hallway.  
In a heap beside its decorative table are the shattered remains of a toaster-sized, antique porcelain pig that Jack had picked up at the junk shop before either of them had moved in. It had been painted bright blue, with fluffy white wings and a laughing red mouth- A symbol, he’d insisted, of good luck and fine taste. He had named her Clementine, and openly adored her, making sure to clean her specially even as the rest of his strange knickknacks and trunks of clothes became dusty and riddled with moths.  
Blind with rage, Mal forces himself to look in Curt’s direction.  
“I was just getting the rest of my stuff, and I bumped into it on the way out.” He says, toeing over Clementine’s snout with his boot.   
“You know he’s sitting up in that fucking hospital room just waiting for you,” Mal’s voice is sharp and spitty as he grips the frame of the bathroom door, he’d just wanted a fucking shower,  
“And now you’re at home, breaking his shit.”  
Curt’s gaze is steady, but his cheeks are pink.  
“I’ll clean it up.”  
“No, no, leave it to me. Why don’t you go see him, so he can get some fucking sleep tonight?” Mal ties the towel in a knot over his hip, and begins to pick through Clementine’s remains, wondering how much superglue it would take to fix her. Curt doesn’t move.  
“I’m leaving. For good.”  
Mal drops a piece of hoof and looks up at him, dressed heavy in his worn winter coat. A previously unnoticed pack hangs over his shoulder.  
“You selfish little bastard. You’re going to destroy him.”  
“We both know it’d be better if I wasn’t around.”  
“You’re still going to kill him. I hope you know that. You’re going to fucking kill him.”  
Mal sees a swell of Curt’s legendary rage rear up in him but he swallows it, and when he looks down at Malcolm his eyes are a wide, vacant gray.  
“Tell him I’ll be at the gig, and I’ll be touring with him, too. I just need to get away from here for a while.”  
He turns, hikes up his pack, and leaves through the front door.  
“Asshole!” Mal screams, throwing pieces of porcelain after him, still kneeling on the floor,  
“Fucker! Fucker!” Then he stops and notices, in a daze, the slow trickle of blood dripping from his left index finger. The burst of air from the street has mixed with the closed-in scent of the house: Garbage, snow, dead lilies, and dust. He stands up to finish his shower.  
When the rain finally hit, it blew dirt in your eyes. It threw branches against the roof, and fat wet swathes of leaves against the windows. It left you in the dark, in a routine power outage, listening to the water flood the drainpipe. How many nights had he spent like that as a child, dreaming of some place like London or Berlin, where everything was too vast and exciting for darkness to ever touch you? What happened to that?  
Malcolm sits down and lets the spray flow over him, but can’t quite get to sleep again.


	9. I'm Blind and Tortured, The White Horses Flow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hi, this chapter feels especially long and I hope it IS especially long, because for the rest of December I have another writing project going on. This project is for a playwright festival, and has an actual deadline, so I really need to get cracking- Therefore editing of the new chapter might not even start until January, let alone posting it, but I have no intention of giving up on this work. So for everyone who's able to bear with me, you are exceedingly kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this exists in a universe where Curt can't play guitar bc we still don't have canonical proof that he CAN play guitar, all he did was slap the damn thing on and scream and yknow boys, I can do that much. fuck Todd Haynes I know what's what

‘Baby’s on fire, better throw her in the water...  
Look at her laughing, like a heifer to the slaughter…’  
The radio is turned up so loud he can hear it even before the car makes the turn. Curt is already awake, and has been for hours, but getting to his feet still feels like moving through deep water.

‘Photographers snip snap, take your time she’s only burning…’

He swallows a faint taste of bile and heads for the front window. If the music choice didn’t alert him to how hopeless he’s being, the sight of the skinny Goth kid sliding into the passenger seat should’ve. The rusted pile of bones sitting on the shabby asphalt doesn’t even resemble Jack’s car, let alone the sleek black limo he’d rescued him in last time.

‘Juanita and Juan, are very clever with maracas, making their fortunes, selling second-hand tobacco…’

The door slams, muting the music somewhat, and he exhales: He feels like he’s been breathing in Brian’s voice, holding it inside his chest like smoke. It dawns on him how stupid the driver must be, blasting music around here- But as the car pulls out, turning the distorted speaker sound to a distant seashell’s roar, Curt finds it hard to feel frustrated. For the first time in weeks, he feels fully awake, like someone’s finally hauled him up from underneath a sheet of ice.  
‘GAY STUNT AT SLADE SHOW.’  
‘ALL THAT GLITTERS- IS GAY!’  
He turns around, and peers back through the gloom towards his spot on the warehouse floor.   
All around him are the rumbling, deadened noises of sleeping people, strange people, faceless and crowded in the dark like corpses. Another car passes, and the kids outside start shouting in German, practically begging the driver to stop. Only the really broke ones work this late, and though he should be used to it by now it’s difficult to stomach the desperation.  
He pushes off from the wall and opens the door, stepping out onto the street. The beauty of this particular location is that it’s only a few blocks from where his dealer lives, hibernating squirrel-like in a basement lined with space heaters. Curt puts his head down as he walks past the midnight crowd, but that doesn’t shield him from them entirely: He still catches a few faces, and knows how interchangeable he must look among them, their skin the same suicidal shade of wax.

Despite everything, if he were going to make a pros and cons list on life since leaving Jack’s, he would have to say that the pros balanced with the cons pretty evenly. For one thing, existence was simpler: The only goal was to get by and Curt, due to a natural talent for it, still had a knack for doing so. That isn’t to say he hasn’t humiliated himself a few times, even since leaving home less than a week ago. Just last night, he’d phoned he and Jack’s manager asking for money, and had spouted just the right amount of junkie desperation and paranoid rambling to convince him that he was going to start gunning people down.  
“Curt, man, you sound like you’re in trouble,” The guy, Rodney or Richard, had said, though Curt had already tuned him out. He knew he wasn’t going to be getting any money.  
“Tell me where you are.”  
He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw stars,  
“It’s not that big a’city. Either you’ll find me, or I’ll be home in time to rehearse.”  
Then he hung up, and managed to find some other way of getting what he needed.   
When he was younger he’d done favors, his life not so dissimilar to that of the kids working the street. Now, though, it seems almost insulting to have just released a successful album and still be worrying over what he’s going to eat. Still, he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’ll be told it’s either rehab or unemployment, and that keeps him from talking to anyone- At least until the Rats are shipped over from America, a special request he’d put in for the tour. How he’ll be able to handle any of it, he’s not sure, but at least he’ll have some friends in town once they get here, people who won’t interfere.  
As much of a safe haven as it was for him before, West Berlin is beginning to feel like a massive live trap. All he wants in the world is to be left alone to get high until he decides whether or not he wants to live.

Luckily for him, the warehouse is perfect for that, as is the street he’s on. In fact, he has quite a lot of variety, more than he’s had since leaving New York. He’d never really tried pills before, but now they seem to be everywhere; Amphetamines with names he can’t pronounce that come from the club kids, benzodiazepines that nearly make him walk in front of cars he’s so out of it, but stop his nightmares, and his current favorites, a plethora of sleeping pills that when mixed and matched could’ve killed Hendrix and Marilyn Monroe twenty times over. They cost next to nothing if you know where to go, and even less if you’re friendly with people, which Curt is just based on his name. The popularity of psychedelics has died down unfortunately, another casualty of Brian’s anti-hippie revolution- Though he’s not sure how popular they would’ve been in Germany in the first place. Seeing as Curt is already hallucinating nearly constantly with little to no enjoyment, maybe that’s for the best.   
All in all, it isn’t a bad life. No matter what he takes, it doesn’t stop him from missing Jack, so he figures that’s punishment enough. At least it proves he has a soul, because no matter how fucked up or sick he gets he hasn’t tried to contact him or go home. But then again, he reminds himself, every time he comes to- It’s only been four days. 

His most pressing problem now is the cold front, which blew in two weeks before with the rain and has sunk into everything like hooks into flesh. It’s the kind of complete frozenness that eats away at his lungs until it’s all he can do to breathe, the runner’s asthma forcing him to nearly vomit even if he’d just been walking to the corner store. Curt put on practically everything he owned before leaving the apartment and still, the cold cuts away at him daily, stripping the skin from his mouth and nose so that they scabbed over and bled. It isn’t uncommon for him to lie awake in the early mornings gray-faced and shaking so hard he can barely to hobble his way to the back, where they burn trash nearly twenty four seven to try and combat hypothermia. If he didn’t do that he’d go to a bar, or an acquaintance’s house, and sleep on whatever surface he could find until some of the exhaustion lifted or the withdrawals got too intense to stand. It isn’t like sleep is really an escape for him, it hasn’t been for years: The nightmares are coming worse than ever, and battle whatever he takes to mute them like viruses. When he closes his eyes he sees the beach, always the beach, never the trailer or the hospital like he used to. Sometimes Brian is there, sometimes he isn’t. In fact, usually he isn’t, and it’s just Curt standing by himself in the cold white wetness, trying very hard to remember things in order, so that the magic God of dreams will let him keep them.   
Always, there’s the pin, burning through his clothes, his time limit running out.  
“Brian.”  
He’d wake up sweating and tuck his head between his knees, forcing himself to remember. He’d do it until he couldn’t stand it, and then beg whatever he could off of whoever he met first.  
“Man, you really should write a book.” One of the club kids, a burgeoning drag queen from L.A. named Veruka told him one day, after he’d made the mistake of opening up so he could ask her for Adderall. As funny and mean as it had seemed at the time, Curt has to admit that it would help. His biggest, and most irrational fear, born up randomly in the coldest hours of the night, is that somehow he’ll lose all memory of Brian. As much as he’d wanted that less than a month ago, before he was dead, and bloody, and then live, and wilting, he wants the opposite now. There’s a Brian, a young, vibrant, quiet Brian, who still follows him around every day like a balloon tied around his wrist- And in his isolation, this is the person he misses the most.

He knows that it stormed, all week long. The airports closed the day after they’d arrived, delayed everything, what a mess, as Brian had mumbled to him on their rickety rented car ride up to the cabin.   
The cabin he’d picked was the most isolated of the twelve. In Curt’s memory, it was a tiny gray shack perched on a tongue-shaped overlook of sheer rock and sand, completely opposite to everywhere he’d been living for the past four years and therefore perfect.   
As the car had approached it, buzzing like a fat fly, he saw that leading down from the overlook was a rotten wooden staircase that ended on the flat white beach. Whatever they needed- Groceries, toiletries, drugs, even people, had to be specially requested and signed for by Brian himself.  
Everything, from the house, to the sky, to sea, was the same sleepy shade of gray.  
Immediately, they began to walk.  
In the early mornings, in the late evenings, when Curt would be tearing off his skin to get out and do something. Dawn, dusk, sometimes during the afternoon, when the beach was at its whitest. They would get lost in all the emptiness- Brian would lose sight of the waypoint, or get so fascinated by a tide pool that the fog managed to blow in without him noticing. He and Curt would stand then at the edge of the freezing water and feel it lapping against their ankles, stinging them raw. It was all Curt could do sometimes not to wander forward and drown himself, letting the water rush over him and pin him down in all the stillness forever.  
“What are you thinking about?” Brian had asked once, when the air had blown in warm, and sunset turned the shrouded sky the color of a raspberry.  
“I think this place is where you go when you die.”  
He hummed, but wrapped his arms around his waist, as though reading his thoughts.  
“You think, or you hope?”  
“…I hope, I think.”  
He laughed, but still, pulled him away from the sea. It felt like pulling teeth.

A few times, when he’d smoked beforehand, Curt convinced himself that he really was dead, and waiting for the ferry to take him across. When he got into these moods he was generally alone, because Brian, also high, would get too upset for him to revel in the idea.  
He could stand there for hours, waiting for the lighted lantern to start gleaming across the water. He would wait until night, and then until dawn, until off in the distance, he’d see a distant golden glow cutting its way towards him: The outside light on the cabin’s backdoor, turned up bright against the night air.  
Shaking, he would turn away, drenched from the mist, and run as hard as he could. 

When he reached the quiet, musty living room, Brian would be waiting for him like a sailor’s wife.  
“This doesn’t exactly feel like a glamorous honeymoon.”   
“Sorry.”  
His eyes were gray, gray from all the surrounding gray, gray even in the dark. Curt kissed him.  
“I’m sorry.”  
“Don’t scare me,” He would be brought closer, against warm skin and a warm sleep shirt, cradled like a favorite puppy,  
“Don’t go away from me.”  
For Curt, loving people meant that they could go away for a thousand years. They could die and be dead. They could become other people entirely, and he still loved them. There was no turning it off.  
“I can’t leave you.”  
He was met with a smile that told him none of it was serious. But, at the same time, it was.

After an extended stay in a cave on the third day, Brian caught a cold. This left Curt alone to walk, which he still did frequently, going further and further without anyone to hold him back.  
The day he thought about jumping off the cliff, and even found a way to get high enough that it would probably kill him, Brian could read it on his face.  
“You said you wouldn’t leave me,” Shame, shame, shame,  
“Don’t do that anymore.”  
That was the first time Brian told him he loved him, and he actually believed it. It was the first time Curt felt tall, and strong, and capable, having to protect him from the realities of the world.

The cabin had provided them, and probably everyone else, with small, sour-smelling hand soaps in the shapes of pink shells. They weren’t any higher quality than the cheap hotel hand soaps that were at their disposal constantly, but Brian was almost bedridden by that time and had developed a certain fascination with them.  
Rosy with fever, his chin lolled on the side of the bathtub.  
“Hold it in your hand.”  
Curt let him place the soap in his open palm, chewing a smile.  
“Now put one in mine.”  
From the bulk box that had been requested, Curt selected one and placed it in Brian’s hand.  
“See? It’s so much smaller in yours.”  
“Uh-huh.”  
“That means you’d be good at guitar- Long fingers.”  
“I think it’s more like big palms.”  
He frowned.  
“Why won’t you learn to play for me? I think it would be hot.”  
Curt looked down at the half-disintegrated soap, still oozing in his palm.   
“Front men don’t play guitar. Jim Morrison didn’t play guitar.”  
“Fuck Jim Morrison.”  
“Well, it’s true. He didn’t play guitar.”  
“When we go out to the beach, I have a present for you.”  
His lashes cast long shadows down his cheeks. Curt watched. He slid the soap off of his hand, back into the box, which was sure to get him in trouble later.  
“What is it?”  
Brian smiled a cryptic, waiting smile.  
“Jim Morrison’s life force.”  
Curt maneuvered himself so that he was lying on the bathroom floor with his head propped on the edge of the tub, his hand skimming the water, occasionally brushing Brian’s skin.  
“I’ve always wanted to visit his grave. I wanna piss on it.”  
Brian pushed Curt’s hand away from his chest, which was pink and soft from the scalding water.  
“Why?”  
“I do his gig better than him- It’s like a dominance thing.”  
Brian studied him a moment, and Curt used this time to dip his hand a little lower, though he couldn’t quite reach.   
In a thoughtful tone, Brian said,  
“I’ve always adored Paris. When we get finished with the record, I’ll take you up there,” With a wet fingertip he traced a line from Curt’s forehead to his chin, from one cheekbone to the other,  
“And we’ll knight you, as Jim Morrison’s superior.”  
Curt’s hand finally brushed Brian’s lower stomach- He grinned.  
“Groovy.”

There was another time when Curt’s evening walk stretched on too long, and a massive rainstorm had bubbled up as the sun set. Half blind and soaked to the skin, he’d thrown himself inside the cabin to find Brian sitting in his robe with a shaggy mane of blue hair.  
A lollipop was tucked into his cheek, and a box of bleach dangled from his left hand.  
“Go sit by the bath,” He said, “You’re next.”  
As Curt whimpered and sat on his hands, Brian sang through the stink of stripped hair:  
‘The king of Marigold was in the kitchen cooking breakfast for the queen,  
The queen was in the parlor playing piano for the children of the king…’  
It occurred to Curt later that he was always singing in the cabin, even when he felt his worst. He couldn’t remember him ever doing it after that.

One day, the day he was sickest, they managed to wander down to the beach together at sunrise. The wind was tugging at everything gently, pulling at the sea and sand like hands, like it wanted to guide the beach away to some better, brighter place. The fog was still thick, but dawn had turned it to Curt’s favorite shade of yellow, with shimmering pink moisture hanging over everything like a perfume.  
For once, he had no interest in watching the light dancing on the water. He was watching Brian’s drained, hollow face, his eyes the pale blue color of an English noble’s.  
“I have a gift for you,” He said, though he was scanning the horizon for something, maybe a speck of blue sky,  
“Close your eyes, and open your palm.”  
“I think I have enough soap.”  
He smiled, but still didn’t look at him, not even when Curt sidled up beside him and pressed a kiss to his neck.  
“Please?”  
“You’re not gonna put your dick in it, are you?”  
He snorted.  
“Don’t make me stand out here any longer, I’m cold.”  
“Alright, fine.”  
Curt took a step back and closed his eyes, opening his hand as he would to hold a small bird. After a long moment, Brian pressed something cool and weighed into the center of his palm.  
Curt opened his eyes.  
Glinting cheerily up at him, the pin seemed electrified, its glow more inward than outward, rising up from its depths like the light of a submarine. He tried to speak, but no sound would come out.  
“I can’t keep this.”  
Brian was smiling strangely, looking down at the sand.  
“It’s not mine to keep- And I think it suits you. I want you to have it,”  
Color was coming back into his slick white skin,  
“It was Oscar’s. He wore it everywhere- He liked to show it off to his boys.”  
Another little smile, this one shy. The waves were a bit stronger, crashing against Curt’s ankles, spraying the cuffs of his jeans. He looked down at it again and desperately, inexplicably, could not stand to hold it. He reached for Brian’s hand, and pressed it back between his fingers.  
“You don’t like it?”  
“It’s not that, it’s just-“ His eyes were filling with tears, Curt panicked,  
“Well- I’ve never read his poems, or anything, I don’t really give a fuck about the guy, it’s not really my scene-“  
“It’s my favorite thing in the world, and I want you to have it. You deserve it. It’ll protect you.”  
With a hint of intuition, Curt reached out and pressed the back of his hand to Brian’s forehead. He was burning up, though damp with sweat.  
“Okay,” He murmured, and he let him tuck the pin into his pocket,   
“Okay, okay.”  
He hugged him to chest for a minute before leading him back toward the stairs, with every intention of giving the pin back to him before the trip ended.  
As they mounted the steps, Brian stopped.  
“A man’s life is his image. I want a part of me to be mixed with yours.”  
He was looking at the sky again, yearning evident all over his face. Curt remembered that at one point, he really had believed that Brian was an alien. In that moment he still had that dreamy, otherworldly glow, like he had just landed and wasn’t sure he wanted to stay.  
“Do you want to go home?” Curt blurted.  
“Oh, yes,” He smiled, still looking up,  
“But not to London.”  
Then he turned, and went up to the cabin.

That night, he had a nightmare. It was brought on by the fever, and it was terrible because Brian never had bad dreams. It was Curt who would wake up, shaking, sweating through his clothes, everything warped and off-color like he was stuck inside an aquarium.  
He was woken up by a tiny, clenched cry, sometime around four in the morning.  
“Hey, hey- You alright?”  
Brian was still as stone, though his eyes were wide open, white and rolling, like a calf in the middle of a botched slaughter.  
“Brian- Hey, what is it?”  
He reached out and touched him, lightly, on the shoulder: The minute he did so, his body relaxed and he sobbed, tensing and un-tensing, trembling from head to toe. Curt sat up and pulled him into his lap, cradling him. He cried for a long, long time before he made any sense.  
“I died. My skin peeled away and turned black, and I got bloated and started leaking blood on the floor, but I was still alive and I couldn’t get out of myself.”  
“That’s fucked up.”  
“It’s the truth. I saw it.”  
“It’s not true. You’re sick and you had a bad dream.”  
He was shaking so hard, Curt became convinced that something was wrong, like he was going to spasm and squeeze all the life out of his brain.  
“I thought you were going to die too, but you didn’t. You just watched me.”.  
“I’m not going anywhere.”  
Brian pressed his nose into his chest.  
“Please just bury me. Don’t leave me out, for everyone to look at.”  
A sick twinge reverberated through Curt’s body. He couldn’t think of what to say.  
After that Brian was quiet, sniffling softly until he drifted off to sleep. Curt held him until his arms gave out, until the pins and needles died, until his limbs ached so much he couldn’t have slept even if he’d wanted to. It felt like he would never close his eyes again.

When Brian woke up the fever had broken, as had seemingly any memory of his nightmare. Peering up at Curt in the dull foggy light, he’d demanded, in a petulant, cracked voice, to be fed his breakfast in the bathtub and to be sung to like his mother used to when he was little. He’d meant that last part as a joke, but Curt was still so terrified he did it anyway, sitting by the tub and singing him every ridiculous radio standard he could remember from his childhood.   
“You’d make such a nice house husband,” Brian mused, playing with a raspberry,  
“But I know you’re only doing this to get sucked off, once I get my strength back.”  
Curt swirled his fingers in the water, beginning to nurse a headache,  
“Oh- Well. Not everything is motivated by that.”  
Brian smiled, a gentle, happy smile.  
“I’ll pay you back. Cheer up. You look like you’ve seen Death.”  
Curt threw a second raspberry at his head, which Brian shook away.  
He looked up at him, pink in the cheeks, his lashes matted with steam. Curt still smelled like his sweat.   
Brian reached out and touched the tip of his chin, tilting it up. A line had formed between his brows.  
“You’re about to cry. What’s bothering you?”  
“Could I- Get in there with you?”  
The concern ebbed and he grinned, toothy and stupid. He slid backward, pulling his knees to his chest.  
“Can you fit?”  
“Prolly,” He threw his shirt to the ground like a dead skin,  
“My ass isn’t that big.”  
Lowering himself into the water he immediately felt better, though it was a tight fit.  
Brian had his chin propped up on his elbow, and was watching him with a ditzy, catlike expression.  
“What?”  
“I want to buy a house in Paris, and I want you to come and live with me.”  
Curt bit his lip.  
“I thought we were just visiting.”  
Brian shook his head.  
“I’ve been thinking about it- London is boring, and I like taking you away,” He blinked slowly,  
“Besides- This way, you can debase Jim’s grave as much as you want. What do you say?”  
The nausea had flipped now, becoming something new, something never experienced. He felt shy, and elated, erased and recreated.  
“Well- Yeah, I could come out there for a while.”  
“Just a while?”  
He swallowed, and focused hard on a mole on the back of his hand.  
“Well- Maybe longer.”  
Brian, with great effort, leaned over the side of the tub and picked up the carton of raspberries.  
“Good. Open your mouth, I want to see if I can get one in.”  
They sat that way until their skin pruned, and their legs fell so asleep it was difficult to get out again.

On the ride home, Brian’s head lolled against the cracked window, his eyes open and piercing. Curt, drifting in and out of sleep, started awake when he shouted,  
“There! Hah!”  
With one finger, he was pointing at a half sliver of moon, barely visible in the bright blue sky.  
“What?”  
“The moon! I haven’t seen it for days!”  
He sank back against the seat.  
“What, were you scared it was gonna change?”  
“I was afraid it would leave me,” He said somberly, in his affected poetic voice that Curt hated so deeply,  
“And I would never write again. Good thing it’s come back. We have a lot of work to do once we get home.”  
All the joy he’d stored up inside himself to carry him through the first few days in London disappeared. He could already hear Jerry’s voice, chewing them out for staying a day longer than they’d planned, and see Mandy’s slightly betrayed smile.   
“Yeah. We do.”  
He slid his hand across the seat and laced his fingers with Brian’s. He wanted to watch him watching the moon for the rest of his natural life.  
A month later, he was out on the street.

Curt sits upright and coughs.  
His eyes fall on the nurse standing in front of him, syringe still in her hand, her mouth a thin dusky-pink stain. Everything is white, but the wrong shade of it, all wrong. He kicks out. She says something in German.  
“Leave me alone. Get off.”  
He’s not so much thrashing to get away as he is to swim, up and out of the water, before he’s out of time. He’s sure if he can just get up, get to his feet, he can get away somehow, he can think of something. Every movement of his body is nauseating, and weak as a kitten’s.  
Heavily accented English,  
“Sir, the year? The year? Can you tell me the year?”  
He looks down at his hands and finds the poorly healed scars lining his palms, the bruised and bloodied veins, the million little cuts decorating him like confetti. Everything is blurry, warped, and scalding with the scent of disinfectant. He’s being hit over and over again with the urge to throw up. He does, a bit of hamburger-flavored bile.  
The nurse raises her eyebrows expectantly as his breathing slows down, and the trembling starts like a warm bath all over his body.  
“1974.”  
She seems relieved.  
“The day?”  
“I don’t know.”  
“Your name?”  
“Curt. My name’s Curt.”  
The second nurse whispers something to her, and Curt catches the phrase ‘brain damage’, which he’d learned off a cartoon.  
“Who brought me here?”   
She pauses a minute, midway through saying something to her partner.  
“You were found outside a payphone, no companion.”  
He tries very hard to remember where he was before, but all he can recall is a dull red glow, eventually slipping into enveloping warmth. Space heaters. He’s floored that Conrad called anyone, and didn’t just leave him to die, but then again you couldn’t really have Curt Wild dead in your house.  
He lies back for a second and squeezes his eyes shut, then vomits again.  
Six days. He’d lasted six days.


	10. The Memories Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was a harder one to write because of the things I had to withhold. much, much longer things are coming. script submitted, waiting on an answer!

*******

GLAM-ROCK FRONTMAN CURT WILD FOUND HALF-FROZEN OUTSIDE PAYPHONE- HEROIN OVERDOSE CONFIRMED

*********************************Wild miraculously survived despite collapse in -1.1° weather**************************************************************************************  
Manager Richard Morrison reports “Death Of Glitter” Tour to go on as planned,*************************************************************************************************  
********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************  
Is Wild facing being dropped from Dog Eat Dog records?**************************************************************************************************************  
******************************************************************************************************************************  
*******************************************************Wild previously fired from ‘Bijou Music Limited’ in December of 1973*************************  
********************************************************************************  
*********Rumors circulating******************************described as a ‘liability?’*************************to start methadone treatment*****************  
*****************************************************garage band ‘The Rats’ to perform for ‘Death of Glitter’.******************************************************  
******************************************************************************************************************************************  
To include such acts as Jack Fairy, The Flaming Creatures, and Polly Smalls.************************************  
***************

Brian carefully folds the paper back into its pristine creases like a small boy with a dinner napkin. The image of Curt’s dull ink, dead white face disintegrates slowly from his vision, dissolving outward from the black smudge pits of his eyes. When it’s completely gone, he looks down at the paper again, and again five minutes later. On the last go round, he stands, undoes the latch, and flings it out the window.  
Curt flutters to the sidewalk as though he were a bird shot through the wing.  
“That’s the first time you’ve gotten out of bed all week,” Coco murmurs,   
“Who died?”  
Brian shuts the window, harder than he needs to, and lights a cigarette.   
“No-one special.”


	11. The Rhythms Fall Slow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wasn't accepted into the festival- But I started a screenwriting class, which I really need to be focused on, so if the next couple chapters are a month and a half apart instead of a month, that's why. Another one that broke my brain. I'm fed up with it, so you have it.

Midwinter, 1974. January 14th is the date that will be printed in the papers, though it will be the fifteenth by the time it reaches England. When it carries over the ocean, by word of mouth, to the two or three people who might still care, it will be the eighteenth or the nineteenth. In a week’s time, when he’s scheduled to give the first in a series of interviews promoting the tour, it will be the twenty-first, and therefore old news in the land of cheap-ink tabloids and cash register magazines. By that time, Jack will already be resigned to it; The fact that his best friend nearly died. 

The sun has almost risen in West Berlin- Light, white and hazy, has touched the tops of the buildings, and the crest of the Wall, but hasn’t yet made it to the streets. Jack sits up very straight with his gaze focused out the window, a black handbag balanced in his lap. He breathes steadily and easily, with his gloved hands resting primly on the soft, ridged surface. His hair is clean and lacquered, though the roots shimmer strawberry-blonde, and he’s dressed immaculately with an orange silk tie and a maroon trench coat that stealthily conceals his thinness. His shoes are shiny black leather, with tiny pumps beneath each heel- Like a schoolgirl’s, his ankles are crossed. He smells faintly of rosewater. Light traces of equally rosy blush grace his white cheeks. Tiny meticulous curls of chocolate-chip eyeliner point up towards his thin brows, which have begun to grow back in as downy arches. He has tinted them lightly, giving him a youthful, surprised expression. All of this is done to ensure that if on the offhand chance someone were to glimpse him through the window of the cab, they would have nary a clue as to how horrible his week has been.

// “You know he just called me, asking for money? Talked like a psychotic, told me he was being followed by dogs with twenty eyes and shit.”

Richard stood in the center of the room, looking like he’d run all the way there,

“First he disappears for the third time in two months, and now he won’t come back- Fucker wouldn’t even tell me where he was- We’ll never fucking find him, either, not in this city. Whatever shithole bathroom he dies in, he’ll be stuck there for at least three days before anyone even notices the smell.”

To ground himself, Jack was trying to remember the words to a folk song he’d found charming back in the sixties. It had been very youthful and pleasant, something that reminded him of childhood;  
‘I saw seventeen pink sugar elephants, sitting under a chestnut tree. I said ‘Good morning, pink sugar elephants,’ but they wouldn’t speak to me…’

“I’m fucking fed up, Jack. I really am, and so’s everyone else. Dog Eat Dog isn’t like Bijou, they can’t cover his ass whenever he acts out.” 

He didn’t have to say, ‘Or yours.’ The last time Jack had cried in front of someone was with Mal- But that had been the first in at least ten years. He cleared his throat politely, as he could sense the listening nurse’s apprehension,

“He can make it up with the tour.”

Richard threw himself into a chair. 

“Not good enough. He needs rehab- And maybe a mental hospital.”

“Oh, come now-“

“I’m fucking serious, Jack. You didn’t hear how he sounded...It was like there was nothing left.”

The tears, burning, but not oppressive, a natural reaction to the exhaustion, ate at the back of his throat.

“If we can get him cleaned up enough to tour, we let him. Then they can do what they want- But he needs to make a bit of money or he’ll never survive.”

“You know how people like him react to touring- Besides, I don’t think I can talk them into it. It’s a dangerous fucking gamble, considering he’s AWOL,”

He shrugged his damp shoulders,

“Maybe running out of cash would limit his habit a bit.”

Jack took a shuddering breath that somehow didn’t end in a cough. He wiped his face with the pads of his thumbs.

“You know it won’t, that’s not how it works. One last favor. If we can’t get him to agree to methadone treatment, if the shows doesn’t go well- They can do what they want with both of us.”

“They’re going to get rid of him either way, you know that.”

“Fine. But he has to tour.”

Richard opened his mouth and said something Jack didn’t hear, because once again he was singing to himself.   
‘He had two eyes but he couldn’t see me there, he had four legs but he couldn’t go anywhere, so we just sat, that early autumn morning, sun not yet risen and magic everywhere…’ //

In the cab, Jack dabs gently at his eyes, and frowns when his handkerchief comes away spotted with mascara. As he tucks it away there’s a sudden swerve, and he’s pushed hard against the door-He muffles a cry as something sharp and unforgiving buries itself in his side, and digs it out like a splinter.  
In the palm of his hand there’s a tiny, black painted crucifix, chipped to silver around the edges. He pockets it just as the light breaks over the top of the tallest building, spilling onto the street in sharp, white rays.

// Earlier that week, Jack had awakened to soft humming. Not pretty humming, like he would’ve imagined- He’d figured, when you died, it was like a mixture of bird song, harp, and the buzzing of bees. This humming was familiar in an off way, like a pop song being played on a kazoo.  
“The Beach Boys,” The endless heavenly expanse he’d been struck with was just the hospital ceiling,   
“Why are you humming The Beach Boys?”  
“Got stuck in my head on the way over.”  
Jack blinked hard, clearing the sleep from his eyes, and focused on Malcolm. He was washed, at least, and was wearing a clean shirt; White, with a ruffled collar spilling through the front of his ever-present black coat. With one hand, he played with a little crucifix on a chain, twisting and pinching it between his fingers. Strangely enough, he looked content- Dopey-eyed, and smiling.  
“How long have you been here?”   
“Mm, an hour and a half maybe. Did you hear the good news?”

“I haven’t heard a word of good news in two weeks. Why?”

“Well-“ He broke into a grin,

“They’re thinking of letting you come home soon. You’ve made a real turnaround since they put you on an IV- The nurse thinks dehydration was half the problem.”

“Not really?”

“Yes really- And you’d better get well soon, because I brought you a present.”

From a battered knapsack tucked under his chair, Malcolm produced a book; Dog-eared, with a wilting cover depicting a smoky mistress and her vampire lover, their clothes ripped open to the waist. He held the book to his cheek, and slid his eyes between the leading lady and Jack.

“A good friend of mine wrote it- She says she based Ms. Justine Pleasure on yours truly, if you can believe it.” 

Jack suppressed his laughter, due to both the pneumonia and Malcolm’s genuine pride.

“Well, I can’t pass that up- Give it here.”

The relief he felt regarding his recovery was more intoxicating than he’d anticipated, and it swept over him quickly so that his body felt dizzy and bright, almost hovering above the bed. He smiled as he took the book, straining the dry skin of his face, and set it aside. Malcolm continued to regard him with sleepy, catlike eyes, the picture of happiness.

“How are things back at home? I fear for my lungs, all the dust that must be piling up…”

Mal’s lip quirked, and he shifted loosely in his chair,

“Well-“

The heat came on with a blast, swirling the long-confined air around the room. The smell of alcohol reached Jack just as Malcolm spoke.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”//

The cabbie grunts,  
“About ten minutes.”  
Jack leans back against the seat and closes his eyes. He is almost tearfully grateful that the underground scene is such that a near-fatal overdose will probably endear Curt to his fans more than anything, that it really only looks bad on the business side of it all. Secretly, selfishly, he’s been terrified of how it might reflect back on him. He’s painfully aware of how catty that is to worry about, but the idea of either of them going back to being hated or mocked after finally finding a patch of genuine admiration makes him sick- Sicker than the idea of them getting fired. The image in his head of riotous throngs waiting for them both outside the hospital, or following the cab...Funny how he’s always felt a bit bitter about being such an underground success when it’s the only reason he has a scrap of sanity left.  
As he steadies himself his mind wanders, and he thinks almost pleasantly of the front page story he’d seen a few days ago- POP STAR BRIAN SLADE ‘STONED’ IN THE STREETS.  
Well, you can’t say his fans aren’t inventive.   
Jack’s lips twitch but the cabbie speaks first.  
“Five.”

He looks back down at the crucifix.

//  
The only way to tell that Mal was inebriated, apart from the smell, was to judge his body language; That was something Jack had learned not only from him, but observing millions like him. His grandmother, for example, was ‘pruned’ every day of her life and functioned so well that people outside her family didn’t know, and people inside her family didn’t care. Unfortunately, nobody had ever had to have a conversation with Nana that was as uncomfortable as the one Malcolm wanted to have with him.

“What have you done now, Ms. Pleasure?”

“It’s about Curtis, he’s uh…”

The necklace made tiny clinking noises with each spin,

“Well, out with it- He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”  
“I don’t know. Wherever he’s been squatting, I guess. He packed a bag.”

Jack was initially confused. He stared down at his hands, which seemed freakishly thin and spidery as they wrung together.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand. You mean, he’s moved out?”

Malcolm’s skin had adopted suddenly a sweaty, reddish sheen, which bled across his face as he spoke-

“I tried to tell him it would drive you crazy- But he said he was doing it for you, yknow- Fucking bastard was only thinking of himself. But yeah. Broke Clementine before he finally fucked off, I cleaned all that up, didn’t leave it… I almost didn’t tell you, but I thought you’d want to know.”

Mal’s snaggleteeth glinted like a cornered dog’s: Duller than the chain, but more frightening.

Jack’s strength, so wonderful and filling a moment ago, seemed to leave him all at once. //

The cab fare is too expensive. Jack, looking up at the hospital, finds it no more daunting than an angry Mount Vesuvius. He turns back to the cabbie, having the sensation that they should say something to each other, but there’s nothing to say. Their little mission beneath the nose of the morning has been entirely one-sided.

At the reception desk he states his name and purpose, explaining that he’s Curt’s cousin.  
“He’s sleeping,” The nurse says,  
“And he won’t be in a good mood when he wakes up.”  
‘At least he’ll wake up.’ But he doesn’t say this.

He follows her down the hall, admiring blandly a portrait of a rose.

//Mal had been pulling too hard at the dainty jewelry shop chain for a while now, and the snap of the clasp at the back of his neck sounded like a tiny joint being popped from a socket. He stared down at the little cross as Jack watched him.

“Do you know if anyone’s tried to contact me?”

“How would I? I haven’t been around the phone.”

“When do I get out of here?”  
“Three days, tops.“

He imagined three whole days lying in that tight white room waiting for catastrophe and a sick sweat formed between his shoulder blades. He tried to think and found it nearly impossible, everything was so slow and flavorless, a massive blob of Thought. He watched two wisps of dusty web tangling with themselves on the ceiling.

“I need you to go home and check my answering machine.”

“Alright.” Mal was scuffing his toes on the linoleum now, his lashes fanning out over the dark hollows beneath his eyes, his happy mood evaporated.

“Then,” He inhaled to keep up momentum,

“Then I need you to look for him- You can ask Billy, Pearl and Ray to help you if need be. It’s cold enough that he should listen to you without much difficulty, but you must try and find him before the temperature drops any further.”

Mal smiled, frowned, looked away then looked back at him, his arched expression the very same as Justine Pleasure’s on the cover of Midnight Madness, Volume 1. 

“You know I would rather rot in Hell than bust my ass in the arctic cold looking for Curt Wild.”

“Don’t be silly, Malcolm, this is serious.”

“I knew you would do this.”

“What am I doing, exactly?”

Mal fixed him with a pointed, though oddly lifeless stare that seemed to trickle through Jack like ice water. 

“Giving him exactly what he wants. You know he’ll be home by the end of the week- All he wants to do is make sure you’re too scared to put your foot down about his situation.”

Rage, an emotion Jack didn’t normally feel, and in fact thought he could not feel unless he saw it portrayed on a movie screen, burned suddenly so that his whole body tensed. It was mixed with more than a little embarrassment, because though he couldn’t consciously conceive it, he knew Malcolm had a point; The only thing in the world Jack wanted now was to have Curt home, drugs or not, no matter what.  
Sensing that he couldn’t speak, Mal continued in a languid voice,

“I meant it when I said we would let it all die. Roots and shoots. Do you remember saying that?”

“I don’t remember what all we’ve said- All I know is that I need you.”

“I don’t think you know what you need.” 

“Are you going to help me or not?” 

Mal closed his eyes, rubbing gently at the sticky violet skin,

“No. I’m not.”

Then, quieter,

“I’m not.”

Panic, exasperation, and a touch of guilty respect whirled inside Jack like a cyclone,

“Then why tell me anything of this? Why even mention it?”

In one quick movement, Mal got to his feet- The cross tinkled to the floor, sliding beneath a chair. He glared into Jack’s face but was obviously unprepared for the naked emotion he found there because, for the first time in the history of their friendship, his gaze wavered. 

“I don’t know why- Maybe it would’ve helped us all more if I would’ve kept my mouth shut, and let him die like he wants to- Maybe if somebody would let him die like he wants to, this whole fucking thing would finally be over with- In fact, I’ve been hoping since he left that he would die- Just so I wouldn’t have to watch you destroy yourself looking for him.”

Silence. Mal’s breathing was heavy, heavier than it needed to be. Jack held himself still as a hidden fawn, but didn’t break eye contact, scarcely daring to breathe for all the horrible things he could’ve said, things he couldn’t have taken back.

“Did I tell you the story of how I first met him?”

Mal suddenly looked melodramatic and strange lolling in the center of the room, his shirt halfway untucked, his hair straggling. He crossed his arms.

“No.”

Jack took a shaky breath.

“I was heading to a club when I saw him outside my window. He was just standing there, completely still, on the side of the road- It was a full minute before he noticed me. He was looking straight up at the sky, which through the lights and noise he couldn’t possibly have seen, but it was like…Like he believed, if he stared at it long enough, that he would see it. Like he was just waiting to see the stars. If I hadn’t stopped, he might have stood there all night, just waiting for them.”

Malcolm broke eye contact and stared down at the floor, arms crossed protectively over his chest.

“So you see, I have to save him. I have to.”

He shook his head and his eyes became two colorless, closed doors.

“Fuck you. Just fuck you.”

As his footsteps faded down the hall, Jack was flooded, somewhat irrationally, with relief.//

Sleep has smoothed out his face, the lines in it, the greased, picked farms of acne blazing on his forehead and chin. Underneath the grime and sweat he appears defenseless; Secretly, Jack has always believed that was where the nightmares came from. They crept in on him while he was sleeping because all the walls came down, because once the insomnia ate a hole in his brain he couldn’t fight them off anymore.  
Curt hasn’t been given a room- Instead, he is divided by curtains from a few people with minor wounds, illnesses, and similar afflictions to his own.   
Jack settles himself into the chair he’d asked for and sets his bag on his knees.  
Gently, he touches his shoulder.  
Curt twitches and blinks, his sleep barely a doze. After a second of muddy confusion, he drags himself to a sitting position. 

“Jack.”

“Curt.”

Curt runs his eyes over him suspiciously.

“You came.”

“Of course, I came. How do you feel?”

“Not too bad. Had a shot not too long ago.” 

Jack knows he’s bluffing but nods anyway.

“Am I fired?”

“Oh, just about.”

“Huh.”

Curt’s expression doesn’t change, though he does rake his hair back from his face, attempting to compose himself. A long silence passes. Jack takes a piece of gum from his bag and chews it, hands shaking with relief.

“Are…. You fired?”

“Fired? I’m disgraced.”

“Oh.”

He keeps his eyes cast down, hiding them. Jack allows himself to bask in Curt’s humiliated silence for a moment before whispering,

“We may still be saved-There’s a catch.”

A slow, grim smile picks at the corners of his mouth,

“Of course.”

“We’ll talk business later.”

“I hate business.”

“Tough. In fifteen minutes, they’ll be bringing a chair around. When you get home and rested, we’ll talk.”

His eyes widen slightly as he picks at a nail so chewed it’s purpling. It takes him a minute to speak, his voice low and secretive.

“I still have a home, then?”

“Of course you do. Don’t be silly.”

“You don’t have to give me one, if you don’t want to-“ He shifts around restlessly, still keeping his eyes on his fingers,

“The whole thing about it was that I didn’t want to force myself on you, or whatever.” 

He gives him a long, searching sideways glance, one that crawls up under Jack’s elegant façade like a louse.

“You still sick?”

“Not sick enough to die.”

“Hm. Sick enough to infect me?”

Jack mock coughs into his fist, then reaches out, sliding the back of his hand down Curt’s scrabbly cheek. He lets it linger for a minute on his feverish, sticky skin, letting himself slowly sink into the fact that he’s still living.

“I just need to know one thing.”

“Hmmm.”

“Was it on purpose?”

Curt’s eyes open and he stares at the ceiling as though willing it to crumble miraculously into an escape tunnel.

“I don’t know.”

“Was it because of him?”

He’s quiet, hands folded in his lap, eyes slipping closed again as a wave of chills washes over him beyond Jack’s control. He can hear the squeak of the wheelchair crossing the ward.

“I don’t know.”

Jack kisses his forehead.


	12. Black Beauty, I Love You So

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, a lot has happened, huh? The screenplay class did not go particularly well- You could say I Sylvia Plath-ed it because I had a depressive episode(no other word for it) in February and lost all motivation to do anything. I wasted my parents money, I acted like a burnout, I hiked around in a field listening to Bob Dylan... This was, of course, right after a particularly bad agoraphobic fit and right before the worldwide pandemic. Then- wouldn't you know it- My old writing computer has busted so a lot of material I was going to Frankenstein into the final chapters might be lost; I intend to work with it more and see how bad the damages are. This is a lightweight chapter I've had planned for a long time and I do hope you'll enjoy it, I want to get back onto a regular schedule of updating but oh my GOD, who even knows anymore? Anyways, thank you to anyone who has stuck around, you didn't come here for my life story but I hope you'll enjoy this one. - L

“Well. Well. Well.”

Billy leans against the doorway of the apartment, partially obscured by the water spilling from the clogged gutters. This, combined with the fact that he’s wearing one of Mal’s old silk bathrobes, gives him the appearance of a white trash geisha in a particularly bad porno flick. His eyes are bleary, and he hasn’t shaved in several days, as evidenced by the tufts of dark hair growing on his zit-pocketed cheeks. 

“So, you’ve been dumped, Ms. O’Hara?”

He crosses his arms, glancing from Mal’s sopping coat to the bag filled with dirty clothes hanging from his left hand.

“I-”

Over top of Billy’s shoulder, through the rivulets of rain pouring into Mal’s eyes and from the roof, the skeletal face of Pearl appears still tinted with day-old makeup. In one hand he holds a glass goblet filled with orange juice and vodka, in the other, an uncracked egg.

“Pearly, wouldn’t you know it, Dorothy’s come home at last.”

“Ah! Not really?”

Pearl’s eyes rest on him vaguely, as though he were an interesting species of vermin scampering across the street. After a moment’s examination, he frowns and looks back down at Billy, gesturing in a way that implied that Mal might’ve been off having a child out of wedlock or else riding the buggy after sunset.

“What IS the matter with him?”

“Jack Fairy’s tossed him out and now he’s crawling back to us.”

“Dreadful.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Like any of you even noticed.”

“Of course, we noticed,” Billy pouts and wraps an arm around Pearl’s waist,

“Ray was so devastated we had to stop him from slitting his wrists in the bathtub.”

There’s a sigh in the air as the speed of the rain increases, stinging the top of Mal’s skull, but neither of them move an inch.

Pearl rests his chin on Billy’s head,

“You must answer a riddle.”

“Fine. What about?”

They look at each other, then back down at Mal.

“I heard a rumor from Cissy that Jack Fairy’s vanilla when you get him between the sheets, and another one from Veruka that he’s into S&M because he’s Catholic. We’ve been fighting about it for ages and I have a good deal of money on vanilla. What say you?”

Despite his best efforts, he snorts, and spits out a mouthful of snotty rainwater.

“That’s not a riddle.”

“We’ll close the door.”

“You’d have to ask Curt.”

“You SEE, I TOLD YOU-”

“WELL SHE S A I D THEY WEREN’T DOING ANYTHING-”

Pearl and Billy dissolve into debate, leaving Mal free to pick his way back inside. After three weeks of perfume and clean counter tops, he’d forgotten the womb-like quality of the place; Nothing but humid darkness, and the soft cushions of hoarded clothes or sleeping people. The only difference he can note since his departure is that the regular stifling humidity has given way somewhat to a misty coldness, and a moldy smell emanating from the stickier corners of the ceiling.

Over by the television, perched on a mop bucket, he notices Ray, naked to the waist, Sharpie scrawled from one cheek down a ways to his belly button.  
It’s an interesting mural, a collection of black fist-sized letters reading SCHWUCHTEL.

“Ray’s boyfriend and him got into a bit of a tiff last night,” Pearl says as he steps back inside, noting Mal’s grin,

“Maybe you’d like to talk to him, when he gets up.”

Mal shrugs. He turns away and takes off his coat, stepping into the bathroom to drape it over the shower rod. He then sets about stripping off his boots and ruined dress shirt, and notices dully that his toes are blue.

“Mind if I run some hot water?”

“Don’t you dare! The bills are too high even with your boyfriend’s money.”

“Fine.”

He reappears, finding that Billy and Pearl are in front of the television eating overcooked eggs off of paper plates, already committed to ignoring him.

Lustily, he falls into his spot beneath the long, low side window, breathing in his old rot. He spreads his arms snow-angel style over the unwashed clothes, the empty cans and the cereal boxes at least two months old.  
When he looks up at the ceiling, he’s enveloped suddenly by his mural; Most of the wall and part of the ceiling remain plastered with his findings from three years of living in Berlin.  
Interesting vodka labels, book pages, bad poetry, blood, paint, wax, and in a schoolboy twist, a vast collection of rockstar photographs ripped from magazines. Over the course of his stay he’s rooted out an admirable line-up- Janis Joplin, The Crystals, Cream, Polly Smalls, a couple of early-days pictures of Curt, and even one very old poster of Brian that had come with his copy of Sebastian.  
Unfortunately, there are also pictures of Jack- Pictures cruelly gleaming beside their yellowing counterparts like old paintings. He buries his face in his elbow.

“So, what is it we’d have to ask Curt Wild about?” Billy asks amicably, his voice booming out over their bad-reception soap opera.

“Drop it. I’m tired.”

“I saw him in the paper recently- Unsurprising, really.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fuckin’ junkie.”

“Sure is.”

“You know,” Pearl swallows the rest of what is probably his fifth drink,

“You come all the way back here from god knows where and you’re in a bad mood, no gossip, and you didn’t even fuck Jack Fairy.”

“I don’t know what you expect, he didn’t want me.” Mal sighs,

“He was sick a lot of the time. Double pneumonia.”

“Have to swallow a lot of spunk to catch that,” Billy says through a mouthful of egg,

“Why keep you around, then? He can’t like our music that much.”

Mal nestles his nose beneath a cheetah-print maxi dress, his hair falling in blonde-black strips over his eyes. The smell here is more intense, sweat and unwashed carpet. 

“I don’t know.”

“I bet he has a lonely heart.” Pearl says sagely.

“I think he’s just a cunt.”

He smiles at the unexpected contempt in Billy’s voice, the dismissive snort, as though Jack were just another indecisive boy that had led one of them around in circles.

“Did you drink all the booze, Pearl?”

“Apple vodka in the sink, dear. Want me to get it for you?”

“Please?”

Giraffe-like, Pearl sways to his feet and retrieves the bottle, handing it down to Mal with the air of a concerned mother doling out cough syrup.

He takes it gratefully, starting at the taste after weeks of nothing but white wine or tea.

“He’s turned you into a fairy too, has he?”

He takes another drink, larger, as though it were tap water. He coughs, but doesn’t lose a drop.

“Sissy, sissy, sissy…” Billy murmurs as Pearl returns to his seat.

Mal hums, the burning in his throat equalizing the burning in his chest so that things began to mellow. The sensation is incredible, like sinking to the core of the Earth.

“Have you seen the news lately?”

“I lived the news.”

“No, no, not about that,” Billy snorts,

“About Slade. Looks like he’s getting dropped from Bijou- They had a picture up, he looks fucked. Hair down to his arse, practically, face looked awful- all eaten up like the flies had got him. He’s going to put himself in a psych ward or something bloody stupid like that.”

Mal squints at the pair of them as they settle on the Dinah Shor Show, the dots clicking together like beads on a string.

“Curt’ll go apeshit.”

“It’s probably what he needs, too.”

“What he needs is to finally kick the fucking bucket.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky, and he will.”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up, boys,” Billy sighs,

“He’s like a fucking cockroach.”

–

The next morning, Mal wakes up miserably hung over with an empty bottle hanging from one hand and Ray tugging at the other.

“Get up, mate. Pearly told me we’re doing some home renovation.”

Mal yanks his hand away and rolls over onto his side.

“What kind of renovation?”

He hears something rip. Malcolm looks up to see Ray reach over and tear a picture of Jack Fairy from the wall, splitting it right down the middle.

Since he doesn’t think he can sit up, he kicks out hard, making Ray yelp.

“WHAT is WRONG with you?”

“Oh, c’mon Mally. It’s good for you. You know it is.”

He stands on his tip-toes and grabs a particularly lovely one- Jack in a long black gown with a mink trim- and manages to dislodge most of it from the wall.

Mal takes it blankly.

“Go on, baby,” He points to the ink on his cheek, now worn away to the point of looking more like a bruise than a word,

“It doesn’t hurt.”

Under his gaze, Mal takes the remaining halves of the page and rips it, then rips it again. He reaches over and grabs one of Curt, pulling it loose in bits, shredding the pieces he can’t pick away with his nails.

“Good boy,” Ray scrapes one from the ceiling, one he’d had to stick up, as Mal had been too short,

“Have another.”

It takes them a quarter of an hour to get rid of everything- All the pictures of Jack and Curt, and anything reminiscent of them, though for some strange reason Mal can’t bear to part with his poster of Brian. Faded and torn at the edges from years of taking it down and taping it back up, there’s something oddly poignant about the baby-blue eyes, the carefully parted, cascading hair, some kind of bygone innocence that appeals to his romantic side.

In a rare display of responsibility, Ray collects the torn bits of paper from around his head and throws them into the wastebasket, which he then takes out into the alleyway and promptly lights on fire. As the smell of cheap melting plastic leeches into the room, Malcolm buries himself again.

He’s still frozen there, trance like, when he hears singing begin down the street. It grows ever closer until Billy and Pearl are on their doorstep with two plastic bags full of groceries, dancing and swinging and screaming.

“God, what a smell,” Billy says as he kicks off his boots, worn to artfully disguise the worst of the tears in his fishnets,

“We’ll have to go out for the afternoon.”

Pearl sinks down beside Mal with his fingers pinched over his nose and runs a hand through his hair.

“Do you feel better, baby?”

“Mmmm.”

“He’ll feel better when we take him out.” Billy says confidently, strolling into the bathroom to dump their communal bag of half-used makeup products onto the counter top.

“Nothing’s even open in the daytime.”

“We can still walk around, then, it’s good for you to get out,” Pearl lights a cigarette despite the rancid air and kisses Mal’s forehead,

“Besides, it’s not always a boring thing to be awake during the day. I ran into Cissy while we were shopping and she told me some very interesting news that I think might perk you up.”

A deep terror of the kinky things Jack and Curt could be doing together runs haywire through his mind, leaving him cold,

“...What?”

Pearl savors it.

“Rumor has it, and mind you, it is just rumors, that Mr. Wild is rejecting methadone treatment.”

Billy’s head appears through the bathroom door, his skin coated in a slather of concealer so white it turns his grin yellow.

“Best part is- He’s getting kicked off the tour.”


	13. Precious, Precious, Silver And Gold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was part of a longer chapter and I've hacked it in half because I believe it'll flow better. The laptop battery was a no-go so it's on to rewriting most everything. Delightful. I have no words for how long this update took.

//

(January 21st, 1974)

“Why not?”

Jack continued to sit in the chair across from him, his afternoon tea steaming in one hand. It was his favorite chair because it almost matched the loveseat; Trippy roses, slanted thorns and little doves that pulsed. Curt blinked hard and shook his head, trying to focus on what he was saying.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if not this, then what? How do you plan to get clean?”

“I don’t.”

The painted table where Clementine had once sat still stood empty, shadowed in the hall, right on the edge of Curt’s vision.

“You do realize if you don’t do this, it’s over? I have no more say. I have no more say, where you’re concerned- I’m already in a lot of hot water as it is.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything else for me.”

Jack’s jaw clenched, the first physical sign of his anger, the tensed muscle looking like it might tear through his skin. That was the wrong thing to say. He should be sitting here wearing daisy wreathes and fairy charms, listening to Joan Baez and eating kale- Cleansing himself. In one fluid motion, so fast that Curt could barely follow it, Jack stood and flung his teacup at the far wall.

The pieces fell all at once, but the stain oozed slowly, dripping down onto the kitchen tile, bloodlike.  
Curt watched it with fascination- The pooling fluid on the floor and Jack, standing in the middle of the living area, his breast working like a frightened bird’s.

“Should I have you put in a mental institution,” He asked quietly, almost to himself,

“Would that have been better? Would that have been responsible?”

The roar of fear Curt felt sent spots dancing on the edges of his vision but Jack was breakable, no longer an impenetrable force, and there was little chance he would be trapped.

He reached up and unclasped the pin from his chest, letting it slide into his hand. It felt like an old war story, like cutting off a limb with gangrene- The pin wouldn’t come loose without effort. It had sunk into the leather like a bone. He held it out to him.

Jack stared down at it.

“I just thought you should have it.”

Jack slapped his hand away. The needle pushed itself deep into the pad of his thumb, and he had to shake it free.

“God! Fucking hell.”

“I don’t want it.”

Curt bent over off the couch and plucked the pin off the ground, tucking it into his pocket. Some of his blood had dripped onto the loveseat, red splotches among the magenta roses, and onto the face of the pin, black on dark green.

Jack turned away from him and walked into the kitchen. He opened the top cabinet, and pulled out a bottle of gin and a glass. Curt watched in awe as he got ice from the icebox and made himself a drink that wasn’t white wine at one o’ clock in the afternoon.

“If you want to make a beautiful gesture, take it back to Brian, but I’m done with it.”

“I can’t do that.”

Jack took a sip. His eyes were very dark, very somber, and Curt could feel him receding up inside himself, leaving him behind like a wave spitting up a shell. It comforted him, in the same way he’d felt comforted when his parents would leave in the morning without speaking to him; The overwhelming relief of no expectations.

“You haven’t tried.”

“He was smarter than you. At least he threw me out.”

“Are you waiting for that?”

Curt shook his head. It would occur to him later that Jack had been expecting this, that maybe his ultimate gift was how easily he let him go.  
He stood up with difficulty and walked across the carpet, and then the kitchen tile, plucking his jacket off the hanger.

“Am I ever going to see you again?”

He turned around and thought that Jack looked really pretty that way, tears smothered, his eyes gleaming black.

“Bye, Jack.”

//


End file.
